My cat is a very quiet cat and her meows are usually little more than a very low hiss type noise, her purrs are the same, never loud and you can generally only hear them if you put your ear to her body.
The weird thing is though, every couple days she will stand over this little bat toy(she never does it without the bat toy) that she has and will start meowing like her life is in danger, i mean really really loud odd sounds. The first couple times I heard it I came rushing to her rescue only to find her staring at me in that typical “what the hell do you want” cat expression. She is spade and I thought it might be some kind of repressed maternal thing, does anyone know?