Scientists make music for cats... and it iz about time!

Music iz the universal language. You can actually listen to this meow-sic here!

Dr. Charles Snowdon, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, haz been on a mission to create music for cats for two reasons. 

"First, many pet owners told us that they play radio music for their pets while they are at work and we wondered if this had any value. Second, we have developed a theory that suggests that species other than humans can enjoy music but that the music has to be in the frequency range that the species uses to communicate and with tempos that they would normally use."

So, Snowdon and colleague Megan Savage worked with composer and musician David Teie, who created the cat-centric music.

"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," Snowdon said. "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."

So, they put their theory to the test and had 47 domestic cats listen to their special "cat music" compared to some classical human music. 

The results? The classical human music waz pretty much ignored, but the special "cat music" turned some heads! The kitties waz immediately interested, and even rubbed their faces against the speakers! 

Now that the researchers haz found music cats seem to like, they think it may have some important applications, like soothing stressed-out shelter cats.

"We think of cats as highly independent of their human servants, but there is some research showing that cats experience separation anxiety, which is greater in human-raised cats than in feral cats," he told Discovery News.

Hopefully this cat music can be put to good use!

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