Now that pets are treated more and more like actual human beings or particularly spoiled children, we cannot be surprised by the fact that the music industry is actually making serious efforts to satisfy the tastes of the most aloof customers, namely the ever-snobbish cats.
Cellist David Teie, who is part of the National Symphony Orchestra, created the so-called “Music for Cats” together with a group of animal scientists.
Please do not envision an orchestral version of Everybody Wants to Be A Cat.
It all started in 2003 with an interest in Teie’s part in the human response to music. “[I ]found that it’s tied to the sounds we heard when our brains are developing,” he wrote on his Kickstarter page. For example, he continues, we like drums because it reminds us of the sound of the heartbeat that we heard while we were in our mother’s womb.
After composing monkey music, which deserved a mention both by the Royal Society and Oxford University Press, he ventured into the music taste of our feline companions.
Biologically, cats are attuned to sounds like the chirping of birds, the sucking of milk and purring, so Teie tried to recreate them using the musical instruments and matched them to the frequency range that cats are most likely to recognize. For example, when the harp plays 23 notes per second, it reproduces a purring sound.
Learn more about the project on Kickstarter.