14 DAY TRIAL // Not to burst any cat lover's bubble or anything of the sorts, but as it turns out, these felines don't claw and scratch when their owners start singing in the shower simply because they loathe and despise music.
No, Sir, cats are sophisticated enough to enjoy a good beat. The thing is that they simply cannot stand the kind of music that we like to listen to. Maybe our taste in music is not quite as elevated as theirs, who knows?
The good news is that, thanks to researchers with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland in the US, cats now have their own tunes to play on repeat until the neighbors start to feel like they're going mental.
That's right, scientists actually made music for cats
In a paper detailing their work, the specialists and presumably cat lovers behind this research project explain that, as part of their work, they started looking at why it is that we humans enjoy music quite as much as we do.
The conclusion that they came to is that the tunes we tend to fancy have a drumbeat that is somewhat similar to our own heartbeat. Besides, their frequency range and tempos are similar to those of natural communication.
Since cats are an entirely different species, it should come as no surprise that they don't like the same songs that we do. With this information in mind, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Maryland specialists set out to make music for cats.
Well, so how did their tunes work out?
To make music for felines, the researchers started by selecting sounds that fell in the same frequency range as cat vocalizations. They then combined these sounds into tempos mimicking auditory input that cats usually find interesting, i.e. purring noises and the like.
“We looked at the natural vocalizations of cats and matched our music to the same frequency range, which is about an octave or more higher than human voices. Since cats use lots of sliding frequencies in their calls, the cat music had many more sliding notes than the human music,” explained scientist Charles Snowdon, as cited by Science Alert.
When these tunes were played to a bunch of household cats, the felines took interest in them. It is understood that it was the younger and the older cats that seemed to especially enjoy them. The adolescent ones were probably just going through a rebellious phase.
If you have a few minutes to spare, head over to the team's website musicforcats.com to listen to a few composition fragments and see for yourselves what felines consider to be proper tunes.
