After studying cats' behavior and hearing, musician David Teie has created an album specifically for feline ears.
While reviews of Teie's Music for Cats albums—which have been on sale for about two years now—are overwhelmingly positive from a feline perspective, humans may see it differently.
The tunes range in style from a kind of serial-killer-biding-his-time to a more soothing I-think-there's-a-bird-trapped-in-my-house.
Teie has quite a resume as a creator of human music, so when you think about it, it actually makes sense that he's branching out. He's been a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra for over 20 years, and he even performed with Metallica once!
He makes the point, "From an age when they were worshipped as gods, to a time when they're worshipped online, cats have had to listen to music they didn't actually like...until now."
The research behind Music for Cats is fascinating. Teie says it is based on his "fundamental nature of music appreciation" theory.
He says that all species have an intuitive biological response to sounds based on brain development and vocalizations. He says he wants to make "species specific" music for other animals, too, but since cats are the most widely kept pets in the world, they seemed like as good as species as any with which to start.
"Imagine you could hear music for the first time, right now. That's an experience you can share with your cat. Science has given us a new way to bond with them, to comfort them, to enrich their lives through music," Teie says.
Music for Cats uses the same "recipe" we use for human music but with ingredients taken from what we know of feline development.
"For example, we have a pulse [or beat] in our music because we heard our mother's pulse in the womb..." reads the Music for Cats website. "...[The] cat's pulse was not present as the little kittens' brains were developing. David uses a sound like the suckling for milk in place of the pulse."
And if the reviews aren't convincing enough, an independent study confirmed cats' preference of Teie's music over different types of human music.
That makes him the only musician in the world who can truthfully say, "Yeah, I'm really big in the cat scene."
Okay, but will it make my cat stop doing this when I play my music?
Keep up with Music for Cats here.
Thumbnail Photo: Getty Images