Do Cats Understand Music? An Experiment With Music Written for Cats

Have you noticed your cat ignoring music? That is not because cats are insensitive to sound. Human music may simply fall outside the design of feline hearing and communication.

Composing for cats

Snowdon and colleagues (2015) began from a hypothesis: for music to mean anything to a species, it must sit in the frequency range and tempos that species uses in natural communication.

Working with a composer, they produced pieces roughly an octave above the human voice, with tempos near purring and the rhythm of a kitten suckling. Pet cats then heard those pieces and human classical works for comparison.

Cats barely responded to the human music. To the cat-specific pieces they responded significantly faster, approaching the speaker and rubbing their heads and cheeks against it — the classic signature of a cat treating something favorably.

Stronger responses in young and old cats

The study also reported stronger responses in younger and older cats, with middle-aged cats relatively muted. The reason is unsettled; age-related changes in hearing and activity may be involved (aging and cognition in cats).

Feline hearing extends to roughly 64 kHz, far above the human ceiling of about 20 kHz — plausibly because detecting rodent ultrasound mattered. Any question about how human music reaches a cat has to start from that gap.

Application in the clinic

Hampton and colleagues (2020) took this music into practice, playing it before and during veterinary examinations. Both cat stress scores and handling-difficulty scores were lower in the cat-music condition.

However, physiological stress as indexed by white-blood-cell ratios did not differ. Looking calmer and being less stressed internally do not always coincide. Reporting that limit plainly is the honest reading.

If you try it at home

First, keep the volume down; feline hearing is sensitive and loudness is a serious stressor. Second, avoid tracks with heavy low-frequency vibration. Third, make sure the cat can leave — the option to escape a sound it dislikes matters.

Fourth, start the music before stressful events such as vet trips or visitors. A familiar sound already in place softens the shock of a changing environment. The link between stress and cognition is covered in stress and cognition in cats.

Sound perception and intelligence

A species' response to music reflects its auditory design and communication style. A cat's indifference to human music is a frequency-and-rhythm mismatch, not a matter of intelligence. The full picture of feline senses and cognition is in can a cat's IQ be measured?.

Human intelligence testing sometimes uses figural items precisely to avoid auditory and linguistic influence (culture-fair IQ tests). NekoIQ's free IQ test is non-verbal as well: four domains, 20 items, about 10 minutes, returning an estimated IQ and percentile. Results are estimates for self-understanding.