Cats and Music — The Most Honest Music Critics Wear Fur
In a living room somewhere, Bach's "Air on the G String" drifts from a speaker. The cat on the sofa does not move. Not even an ear twitches. Then the track changes. This piece sounds a little strange to human ears: high, sliding tones strung together. The cat's ears swivel toward the speaker. It gets up, walks over, and rubs its cheek against the corner of the speaker.
This scene is not imagined. It is based on real reactions recorded in a 2015 study, in which researchers visited cats in their own homes and watched how they responded to music.
Cats do not applaud out of politeness. If they dislike something, they ignore it. If they like it, they come closer. That may make the cat the most honest music critic in the world. And thanks to this honest critic, science has found a fresh angle on an old question: what is music, really?
Cats Are Not Interested in Human Music — and There Is a Reason
Let us start with an uncomfortable truth. If you play music next to your cat, it will most likely show no particular reaction. It will not lean in to listen, and it will not come over in delight. It ignores the music. This is not because cats hear poorly. Quite the opposite.
The hearing range of cats is commonly given as roughly 45 Hz to 64,000 Hz. That is far wider than the human range of about 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, especially at the high end. Cats can hear high-pitched sounds we cannot. The problem is that our music was never made for them.
One study tackled this question head-on. In 2015, psychologist Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, cellist and composer David Teie, and Megan Savage published a paper in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Their starting point was simple. Human music is tuned to human senses: the pitch range of the human voice, the tempos humans find comfortable, and the sound patterns humans find meaningful. Teie argued that much of the emotion we feel in music comes from these distinctly human features of sound.
So what about cats? A cat's vocalizations are much higher than the human voice, and the rhythms that make cats feel at ease are different, too. The researchers' hypothesis was that human music might reach cats as little more than background sound, carrying almost none of the emotional signals that matter to them.
Species-Specific Music — Composing for Cats
To test this idea, the team composed music tailored to how cats hear and communicate. This kind of music is called "species-specific music": music designed around the sound world of a particular species.
How was it made? Teie focused on the sounds cats make when they are relaxed: the rhythm of purring, the rhythm of a kitten suckling, and the way a cat's voice slides up and down rather than staying on one note.
He then turned these into musical elements. Purring and suckling rhythms became the pulse of the pieces. The melodies were placed an octave or more above the range of human music, and sliding tones (glissandi) resembling cat calls were woven throughout. The result was two pieces: "Cozmo's Air" and "Spook's Ditty."
To human ears, the music sounds a bit odd. It is high, long and sliding, and it does not follow a familiar beat. That is because it was not written for humans.
The researchers played these two pieces, along with two pieces of human classical music, Bach's "Air on the G String" and Fauré's "Élégie," to 47 cats. The results were clear. When the cat music played, the cats looked toward the speaker, approached it and rubbed against it far more often. They also responded more quickly. Human music, by contrast, drew almost no reaction.
Age made an interesting difference, too. Young cats and older cats responded more strongly to the cat music than middle-aged cats did. Why this happens is still unclear. But remembering that the raw material of the cat music came from sounds shared between mother and kitten leaves some room for imagination.
After the study, David Teie raised funds through crowdfunding and released an album of music for cats, "Music for Cats." Some cat owners now leave it playing for their cats when they go out.
Sounds Cats Respond To — Clues from Science
Research on cat music, along with studies of how cats hear and vocalize, offers a few clues.
A higher pitch range: Cat vocalizations are much higher than human speech. That is why music for cats mostly uses a range an octave or more above human music.
Familiar rhythms — purring and suckling: A purr is a regular vibration, usually somewhere around 25 to 150 times per second (25–150 Hz). A suckling kitten also moves in a steady rhythm. Cat music borrows these rhythms as its pulse, aiming to send cats a familiar, comforting signal.
Sliding tones: A cat's call rarely stays on one pitch. It glides smoothly up and down. These sliding tones are closer to the cat's "language" than the crisp steps of a human musical scale.
Avoiding sudden sounds: Sounds that suddenly grow loud, or deep, booming bass, can put cats on edge. That is why music for cats tends to be slow and gentle.
Chopin's "Cat Waltz" — The Moment Music Is Born
Now let us travel back in time. Frédéric Chopin's Waltz in F major, Op. 34 No. 3, is one of the "Grandes valses brillantes" published in 1838. The piece carries a nickname: the "Cat Waltz."
A story follows the nickname. While Chopin was composing, the story goes, a cat leapt onto the piano and scampered across the keys, and Chopin drew on those accidental sounds to create the waltz's fast, ornamented runs.
The waltz does feature lively passages that dart up and down the keyboard. They bring to mind a cat that runs, stops and suddenly changes direction.
Still, this is only an anecdote that has been passed down. There is no reliable record that Chopin kept a cat or wrote this piece because of one. The nickname "Cat Waltz" was given by listeners. Yet the fact that the nickname has survived so long means that many people have heard a cat in this music.
Rossini's "Cat Duet" — A Song Whose Only Lyric Is "Meow"
Some pieces turn the sound of cats into the song itself. One is the "Duetto buffo di due gatti" (Humorous Duet for Two Cats), often attributed to Gioachino Rossini.
Usually sung by two sopranos, the piece has only one word of lyrics from beginning to end: "miau." Two cats meow back and forth, push and pull, quarrel and make up, all in music.
In fact, Rossini did not write it himself. It is an arrangement published in 1825 under the name G. Berthold, stitched together from melodies in Rossini's opera "Otello" and the "Katte-Cavatine" (Cat Cavatina) by the Danish composer C. E. F. Weyse. Even so, it remains a beloved concert encore and the "cat song" most likely to make an audience laugh out loud.
Music Composed by a Cat? — Scarlatti's "Cat's Fugue"
The Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757) is famous for his 555 keyboard sonatas. One of them, the Sonata in G minor, K. 30, has been known since around the 19th century by the nickname "The Cat's Fugue."
According to legend, the theme of this piece came from the notes Scarlatti's cat, Pulcinella, played while walking across the keys of a harpsichord. Before the piano came into wide use, the harpsichord was Scarlatti's main instrument.
The fugue's theme is indeed unusual. Instead of a typical melody, it climbs the keyboard in irregular, spaced-out steps. That is why people say it resembles the notes a cat might sound while stepping across the keys one paw at a time. This story has not been confirmed as fact either, but the piece is still performed regularly in concert. A legendary cat's footsteps have, in effect, become part of the classical repertoire.
Nora and the "CATcerto" — A Cat Performer for the Internet Age
In the late 2000s, videos of "piano-playing cats" became a sensation online. The most famous of them was Nora, a cat living in New Jersey. Nora grew up in the home of piano teacher Betsy Alexander. After watching students take lessons, she one day began climbing onto the piano bench and pawing at the keys herself.
Nora's performance videos, posted on YouTube in 2007, became a worldwide sensation. And the story has a remarkable sequel. Lithuanian composer and conductor Mindaugas Piečaitis created a real orchestral work based on Nora's playing.
Titled "CATcerto," the work projects video of Nora's playing on a screen while a live orchestra plays along with her. It premiered in Klaipėda, Lithuania, in 2009. The keys a cat tapped without a second thought became the solo part of a concerto.
Can Cats Appreciate Music? — What Neuroscience Shows
Can cats "appreciate" music? This is a more fundamental question. Put very simply, appreciating music means recognizing patterns in sound and responding to them emotionally.
The feline auditory system is highly sophisticated. The cat's auditory cortex has long been an important subject in research on how the brain processes sound. Cats can tell complex sound patterns apart and remember them. Have you ever seen a cat hide the moment it hears the carrier door open? That is the ability to link a particular sound to past experience and give it meaning.
When a cat approaches or avoids certain music, it suggests that the sound carries a meaningful pattern for the cat. Of course, we cannot know whether cats feel the same kind of emotion humans feel when listening to music.
But it is observable that certain sound patterns can make cats feel relaxed or anxious. One could see that as the most basic form of appreciating music.
Cats in Classical Music
Many composers throughout history have portrayed cats in their music.
Maurice Ravel was a composer who adored Siamese cats. It is well known that he lived with his cats at Le Belvédère, his home in Montfort-l'Amaury, France. Ravel's opera "L'Enfant et les Sortilèges" (The Child and the Spells, 1925) features the "Duo miaulé," a duet in which a tomcat and a female cat exchange nothing but meows. The opera's librettist, the writer Colette, also loved cats and wrote the novel "La Chatte" (The Cat), with a cat at its center.
Igor Stravinsky wrote the song cycle "Berceuses du chat" (Cat's Cradle Songs) in 1915–1916, for female voice and three clarinets. It consists of four short songs set to Russian folk texts, capturing simple everyday scenes around cats, such as a cat dozing on the stove.
In Act III of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet "The Sleeping Beauty" (1890), there is a pas de deux for Puss in Boots and the White Cat. The orchestra imitates meowing as the two cats playfully swipe at each other. In Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" (1936), the clarinet plays the cat, capturing its stealthy, creeping steps.
Music has not always portrayed cats kindly. In German, "Katzenmusik" ("cat music") has long been used as a mocking term for grating noise or a terrible performance. Yet even this expression shows how vividly people remembered the sound of cats' voices.
Practical Applications — Playing Music for Cats
How can all this research be put to practical use?
At the veterinary clinic: In 2020, a research team at Louisiana State University published a study of 20 cats in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery. When the cats heard cat-specific music during their examinations, their stress behavior scores were lower than when classical music or no music was played, and they were easier for the veterinarian to handle. However, blood-based physiological measures showed no clear difference. Music is not a cure-all, but it can make a strange, tense exam room a little less frightening.
At home: For cats that spend long hours alone, leaving cat music on is worth a try. But music is only a supporting tool. If you suspect separation anxiety, talk to your veterinarian and also provide environmental enrichment, such as play, hiding places and high perches.
What Kind of Music Works?
Taken together, the research suggests that the music cats respond to best is cat-specific music made for their sound world. What about human music? A 2016 study by a team at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, published in the same journal, offers a hint. When 12 cats undergoing surgery under anesthesia heard classical, pop and heavy metal music, their breathing rate and pupil size were lowest during classical music, indicating the calmest state, and highest during heavy metal.
So if you play human music for your cat, calm classical music is a safer choice than loud, intense music. Still, every cat has its own taste. The best approach is to watch which sounds make your cat turn its ears and which make it leave the room. In other words, ask the most honest music critic in your home.
What Cats Teach Us About the Nature of Music
There is an intriguing paradox in all of this. For a long time, we believed music belonged to humans alone. Yet once we learned that there is music cats respond to, the question of what music is only grew deeper.
Perhaps music is a phenomenon in which a particular pattern of sound sets off a meaningful resonance in the nervous system of some living being. That being need not be human. Think of the sounds Pulcinella the cat is said to have made walking across the keys. No one could have known they would be played in concert halls centuries later.
Like the listeners who heard a cat's footsteps in Chopin's waltz, sound becomes music wherever there is an ear to hear it. Perhaps the purest form of music is the moment we find meaning in sounds made without any intention at all.
That is what cats have taught us. With their paws.
References
Snowdon, C. T., Teie, D., & Savage, M. (2015). Cats prefer species-appropriate music. Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Hampton, A. et al. (2020). Effects of music on behavior and physiological stress response of domestic cats in a veterinary clinic. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.
Mira, F. et al. (2016). Influence of music and its genres on respiratory rate and pupil diameter variations in cats under general anaesthesia. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.
Heffner, R. S., & Heffner, H. E. (1985). Hearing range of the domestic cat. Hearing Research.