Unbelievable facts
Many pet owners leave home in the morning, leaving the radio on all day, so they hope to bring more joy to their cats and dogs. However, the choice of radio stations varies. “Humans have a tendency to project their preferences onto their pets, which means we think they should like what we like,” says Charles Snowdon. specialist in animal musical preferences.
“People think that if they like Mozart, their dog loves him, and if they love rock music, their cat loves it too.”
Contrary to popular belief that music is a unique human phenomenon, current research shows that animals actually have musical abilities. But instead of assuming that animals love classical music or rock music, Snowdon came to the conclusion that pets prefer completely different music. They enjoy what's called “natural music”: tunes specially designed using special tones, rhythms, and tempos.
It's all about the halftone scale. People love music that is within our acoustic and vocal range, that uses tones that we understand, and that develops a tempo similar to our heartbeat. Music created using a sound grid that is too low or too high is difficult for us to perceive, as is music that is made at a tempo that is too fast or too slow.
For animals, human music is too heavy to listen to. Their vocal ranges and heart rates are very different from ours, they just can't enjoy songs that are tailored to our ears. Research shows that, as a rule, animals react to human music with a complete lack of interest. With this in mind, Snowdon worked with cellist and composer David Teie to compose music that would suit animals.
Back in 2009, they wrote two songs for monkeys — tamarins, whose vocalization is three octaves higher than that of humans and whose heart rate is twice as high. For the human ear, songs sound very piercing and unpleasant, but for monkeys they are a real pleasure. After listening to them, the tamarins were clearly positively excited and active. On the other hand, after listening to the slow track, they became extremely socially responsive.
Thus, experts began to compose music for cats and dogs and study how pets react to it. “We've created music that corresponds to a faster-than-human heart rate for cats and a higher vocalization range,” Snowdon says. As a result, they started selling cat music online ($1.99 per song) through a company called Cat Music.
Creating music for dogs is more difficult, mainly due to the fact that different dog breeds differ in vocal ranges and heart rates. However, large dog breeds such as mastiffs and labradors have a vocal range that is very similar to that of humans. “Thus, it is possible that these dogs can respond to music in our frequency range. That is, a large dog will be more sensitive to human music than a small dog, such as a chihuahua,” Snowdon said.
Indeed, some dogs react very emotionally to human music. A study led by Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, shows that dogs can differentiate between different genres of human music. “We came to the conclusion that dogs respond to different types of music in different ways, for example, when they hear a classical song, they are more in the mood for rest and relaxation, and when they hear the sounds of rock music, they are starting to show signs of more aroused behavior,” she explains.
Given the high demand for new ways to please your pets, significant progress will be made in this area. But no matter how well composers improve music for cats, dogs and monkeys, animals will not be able to appreciate the beauty of music the way humans do. According to Snowdon, they lack an important musical ability that we have: capturing the relative pitches of sounds.
“It is known that many animals have absolute hearing, but they cannot distinguish between relative pitches of sounds. They can learn to recognize a sequence of notes, but if they transpose notes to a different key using the same sequence of notes, they won't be able to recognize the melody. That is, a person understands music differently than an animal does.”