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Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Music For Cats

Music for Cats image
After reading the headline you're probably thinking, "This is a joke, right?" Nope, it's the real deal.

A study published in the Applied Animal Behavioral Science journal found that many animals respond favorably to specific types of music, especially cats.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that when played a specially prepared piece of music "...cats showed orientation and approach behavior toward the speaker with the cat music, rubbing against the speaker while the music was on."

This might sound like a bunch of hokum, but there's actually some science involved here. The researchers looked at the natural vocalizations of cats and matched the same frequency range, which is about an octave above a human's voice.

They then matched the tempos to the rhythms of a cat purring or suckling, and added a lot of sliding notes and frequencies, since that's what cats do normally in their calls.

The researchers tested this on 47 cats that were all domesticated house pets (including their own) and first played a couple of classical pieces (Gabriel Faure's "Elegie" and Bach's "Air on a G String") as a control. While the cats weren't frightened, they showed no interest (sounds familiar, right?).

When the researchers played the specially composed "cat music" created by David Teie, the cats responded by purring and rubbing up against the speakers.

I played the snippets of cat music found below for my two kitties (ages 12 and 11) and they both were more interested than they normally would be from any other music, one a little more than the other. No rubbing up against the speakers though.

The researchers found that certain breeds of cat respond more, as does either younger or older cats. Middle aged cats respond like..........cats.

If you own a kitty, play him one of the following snippets and see if he responds.

Spooks Ditty

Cozmo's Air

Rusty's Ballad

You might also want to check out the Music For Cats site. Do your cats dig this?

Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.

1 comment:

Billy Beek said...

Very interesting i noticed back in the day that my cat Sushi would love to lay on my subwoofers only on certain music. I assumed that there was a correlation with notes and his purring
Bill

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