http://www.npr.org/2015/03/07/391377916/these-tunes-are-music-to-your-cats-furry-ears
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
Applied Animal Behaviour Science
Volume 166, May 2015, Pages 106–111
Highlights
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- Music is often used for enrichment of animals, but results are conflicting.
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- We present a theory of species-appropriate music and test this with domestic cats.
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- Cats responded more to species-appropriate music than to human music.
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- Species-appropriate music is more likely to benefit animals than human music.
Abstract
Many
studies have attempted to use music to influence the behavior of
nonhuman animals; however, these studies have often led to conflicting
outcomes. We have developed a theoretical framework that hypothesizes
that in order for music to be effective with other species, it must be
in the frequency range and with similar tempos to those used in natural
communication by each species. We have used this framework to compose
music that is species-appropriate for a few animal species. In this
paper, we created species-appropriate music for domestic cats and tested
this music in comparison with music with similar affective content
composed for humans. We presented two examples of cat music in
counterbalanced order with two examples of human music, and we evaluated
the behavior and response latencies of cats to each piece. Cats showed a
significant preference for and interest in species-appropriate music
compared with human music (median (interquartile range (IQR)) 1.5
(0.5–2.0) acts for cat music, 0.25 (0.0–0.5) acts for human music, P < 0.002)
and responded with significantly shorter latencies (median (IQR) 110.0
(54–138.75) s for cat music, 171.75 (151–180) s for human music (P < 0.001). Younger and older cats were more responsive to cat music than middle-aged acts (cubic trend, r2 = 0.477, P < 0.001). The results suggest novel and more appropriate ways for using music as auditory enrichment for nonhuman animals.
Keywords
- Cats;
- Auditory enrichment;
- Emotions;
- Music;
- Species-appropriate
- Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Tel.: +1 6082623974.
