To the long list of things your cat despises about you, you can now add your music collection. Scientists in the United States have discovered there is a feline preference for “species-appropriate” music – purring tempos and sliding wails are the things that soothe the average cat.
Two psychologists, Charles Snowdon and Megan Savage, and a composer, David Teie, teamed up for the project at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. They created three purpose-written melodies and tested them out on a group of 47 domestic cats, also compared in “human” music by composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Gabriel Fauré.
The cats showed trademark disdain for the great composers but when “their” tunes came on they reacted positively rubbing the speakers with their faces.
“We looked at the natural vocalisations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices,” says Snowdon. “We incorporated tempos that we thought cats would find interesting – the tempo of purring in one piece and the tempo of suckling in another – and since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music.”
The same team of researchers has done this sort of thing before. In 2009, they showed tamarin monkeys ignored human music but were calmed by music tailored for them.
They say that the finding could provide a way to soothe the nerves of animals in zoos and other forms of captivity.
Click on the links to hear the three melodies – Spook’s Ditty, Cozmo’s Air and Rusty’s Ballad.
