“Music soothes the beasts .” This popular expression has its origin in the legend of Orpheus, a Greek poet and musician who had a song and a way of playing the lyre that appeased the wildest beasts and that, with the passage of time, has been used to refer to the calming capacity of music for aggressive or nervous behaviors.
This was the starting point of the research of a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Maryland (USA). Can it cause the same calming or therapeutic effect in cats? For this they developed a series of melodies focused on these felines.
“We looked at the natural vocalizations of cats and they corresponded to our music in the same frequency range, which is about an octave higher than human voices, ” explains Charles Snowdon, leader of the study that has collected the journal Applied. Animal Behavioral Science .
To make this type of music interesting and relaxing for the cats, they introduced a tempo with a purr base and another with a sucking rhythm. In the experiment, they first tested human melodies and later songs designed for kittens with 47 domestic cats, discovering that cats did not react at all to human melodies (from Bach, for example); however, at the “cat music”, they got excited and began to approach the speakers from which the music was coming, rubbing their noses against the speaker.
The researchers believe that the result of this experiment could offer new ways to relax our pets , especially in places where a large number of them accumulate, such as animal shelters or veterinary clinics.
“The results suggest new and more appropriate ways to use music as auditory enrichment for non-human animals,” the authors clarify.
