If cats could write music, what kind of music would they come up with? A new Kickstarter campaign aims to tap into that with music specifically designed for cats. The campaign is funding a 40-minute recording specifically designed with cats in mind. According to a story on C|net, cats form their sense of music outside the womb, and so this “cat music” will incorporate specific sounds that are, ideally, music that cats will enjoy.
The composer of this cat music is a professional cellist who has been working on this for years
David Tele, the creator of the Kickstarter campaign, started working on creating cat music back in 2008. According to the campaign’s page, the Washington Post said his music “would have been major hits on the cat-music Billboard charts, if there were such a thing.” 77 percent of the cats that heard the music reacted positively to it, while they showed almost no interest at all in the human music that was played for them.
We humans enjoy music because it’s evocative of sounds we heard when our brains were developing. For instance, according to Tele, we like drums because it reminds us of our mother’s heartbeat. He also believes it’s not a coincidence that the tempo of music we find most relaxing is close to what our mothers’ resting heart rates were.
Tele believes that this is universal. The reason that cats don’t respond to human music is because it doesn’t contain sounds that they heard when their brains were developing. So he set out to write music that did have sounds and tempos animals heard during that stage of their lives. The first music he wrote was for monkeys, but when he realized he wanted to make a business of cat music, he decided to do that, too.
Tele’s vision includes therapy music for all animals
Eventually, Tele says he’d like to use specially written music to calm down captive whales and soothe abused dogs. But his business needs to be sustainable first, so he decided that cat music was a logical choice, since cats are popular pets.
Besides that, many cat parents have stressed-out cats and they don’t know why, or what to do about it. These cats often have behavior problems, such as refusing to use the litter box and scratching up the furniture. If these behavior problems are the result of stress, then perhaps cat music can help to solve them.
The sounds that Tele incorporates into this music include chirping birds, purring, the sound of sucking milk, and cats’ vocalizations. He uses tempos that are more normal to cats, so that he creates something they can understand.
You can learn more about Tele’s cat music here, at his Kickstarter page, and you can listen to samples of his music as well. This has become a life mission for him, and it’ll be interesting to see if this really works for animals like he hopes.
