Why don't cats like music?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is something I think about a lot.

See, my kitteh has been with me when I’ve listened to Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails, punk, Goa, dabke, gamelan, bellydancing and tsiftetelli. He’s been there when I get my wild hairs to listen to seventies R&B, songs I learned in high school choir (“O Magnum Mysterium”), Gogol Bordello, Nat King Cole, Black Uhuru, New Wave music, and even the Partridge Family.

Needless to say, he’s completely impassive. There seems to be nothing that gets those 20 pink toes tapping.

It seems that cats aren’t interested in music. But why? Are primates and cetaceans the only creatures that have that section of the brain?

But then, what about that dancing parrot? And is bird “song” not song at all in the human sense? When birds sing, do they have any sense of meter and rhythm? And what about dancing bears?

As you can see, I have a lot of questions; and hence I didn’t put this in GQ because of all the musing.

Tell me about your surprising stories of unlikely creatures who have music in their souls, or the fire down below. Point me to video of dolphins or whales dancing.

And if you have a scientific answer to any of the above, all the better!

2

just too loud for them.

3

My tuxedo cat likes music, or at least it seems like she does. We have a Ukulele that we keep propped up against a book shelve in the living room. I have seen her go up to it and pull each string with her teeth. She doesn’t just pull and walk away - she gently puts it between her teeth yanks once and listens to the note until all sound is gone and then she does it again. Sometimes a different string, other times the same one. I have tried to catch her on film, but like a typical cat, it’s almost like she knows how badly I want this. As soon as I have camera in hand she looks at me like, “What? Oh this? Naw, I’m done.” My friend told me that when he was coming to feed her while I was gone, he would play the Uke for her and she seemed to actually be listening. I believe it.

4

Wow, scootergirl, that’s really cool! I have always found tuxedo cats to be very earnest and thoughtful. Orange tabbies, not so much; maybe that’s the deal with my Orange Julius. They are verrry affectionate and supportive, but, eh, not really philosophical.

However, I had also forgotten about the various cats who play piano.

But… why no rhythm?

5

My cats respond to very little aural input. If it involves their name, they respond (as when I speak to them); but otherwise, they don’t. Interestingly, my cat Denver will watch a TV football game involving the Denver Broncos, but that’s likely because he hears his name during the broadcast (“Denver is on the thirty yard line” for example).

But otherwise, my cats don’t respond to what they hear: not music, not TV sitcoms, not me speaking on the phone. If it doesn’t involve their name, they don’t respond.

6

It may have something to do with the cat gut violin and guitar string myth, passed down from litter to litter since the 13th century.

7

My roommate’s cat used to follow me around whenever I sang to myself (when I was home alone, of course) and yowl along occasionally.

8

Some cats love music.

9

My cats enjoy the pet music cd that came with their goodie bag when I adopted them. None of the songs sound particularly catty, whatever that might be. They just hang out near the stereo, maybe settle down for a nap.

My canary, the late great Basilio, definitely knew he was singing for a reason-- to get the ladies! He was an excellent dad, which I wonder was somehow related to his prize-winning singing. Of course he was a Spanish Timbrado canary, bred specially for singing. I’d whistle to get him riled up and then he’d riff some incredible (loud!) trills, obviously proud of his prowess.
He didn’t have rhythm, but he definitely knew what was an intro, body, and conclusion.

10

Ono! You mean the “verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus chorus” thing extends to the animal world? :eek::eek:

…Just kidding, that’s a good point. That would tend to suggest that, in some sense, the idea of a “song” has a meaning for birds similar to that of humans. I wonder if any birdsong has a (repeated) refrain?

11

Well, before understanding why some animals do and don’t respond to music, it would help if we had a really solid theory on why humans enjoy it.

12

What I’ve noticed is that cats respond to stimulus that matches something they know about. When my cats watch TV, they are only interested in nature shows about cats (lions, etc) but ignore the parts featuring antelope. Prior to meeting their first dog, they took no interest in dogs on TV; afterwards, they did.

Not sure what it all means for music.

13

My one cat is very social, he ‘talks’ a lot and seems to loves it when I sing to him -he’ll stare back and me and meow in different ways. But generally, cats seem to tune out all human noise; they’ve got more important things to listen to. If you made ‘music’ featuring the types of sounds cats find interesting, I’m sure they would be fixated.

14

IIRC, scientists have found that only birds and humans can move to a beat.

15

These people claim that cats don’t care about the music we listen to because it’s designed with human aesthetics in mind.

16

IME (and I fully agree this might be because we have food-obsessed cats), cats do things entirely out of self-interest or assumed self-interest. Cats come to the door when you come home from work? It’s because they want to be fed. Cats run to the kitchen when you go there? Same thing. Cats sleep on your lap? It’s because you have the warm blanket on your lap and it’s comfortable. Why do we have a cat who fetches things when we throw them? Because when she comes back with it we scratch her behind her ears and throw it again.

But with everything else? They just honestly don’t care. If listening to “U Can’t Touch This” and doing a synchronized Hammer Dance across the floor got them huge amounts of turkey, by God they’d learn how to do it.

17

Just birds and humans? How very interesting. I wonder what the common factor is?

18

Hey, Malleus, Incus, Stapes! I googled your quote above, “only birds and humans…” and I got this site, from which I quote the following:

*Adena Schachner is a graduate student in the psychology department of Harvard University. She says she was familiar with the idea that some people had made videos of birds supposedly dancing. And back in 2007, when she got interested in this, a famous African Grey Parrot named Alex lived at a nearby animal cognition lab. So she and her colleagues created some new music, something no bird could have heard before, and they played it for Alex.

“We were shocked, basically, when we put on these tracks and saw him bobbing his head what looked like to the beat,” Schachner says.

Unfortunately, Alex died soon after. But Schachner realized that they could look for other dancing animals, with the help of YouTube. “We searched for ‘cat dancing’, ‘dog dancing,’ ‘bird dancing,’” she explains.

She and her colleagues eventually analyzed more than 5,000 videos. “Imagine watching YouTube eight hours a day for a month,” she says. “That’s pretty much what we did. It was amusing for perhaps the first couple of hours.”

In the end, only 33 videos really seemed to show creatures moving with a beat. There were 14 different species of parrots and one elephant species.

Dancers Are Vocal Mimics

Schachner says the important thing is that, like humans — and unlike dogs or cats — parrots and elephants are both known to be vocal mimics. They can imitate sounds. “And that’s really striking,” she says.

It means dancing may be a byproduct of an ability that evolved for vocal imitation and vocal learning. After all, to mimic a sound, you have to listen to it and its rhythm and then use that information to coordinate movement — to shape the way you move your lips and tongue.*
That is exactly what I was wondering about! Thank you!

19

In many cases, the brain. Hence the term “birdbrain”.

20

My beloved cat Sox didn’t seem to pay attention to recorded music, but when I strapped on my electric baritone ukulele and plugged it into the Twin Reverb and turned up the crunchy distortion he would often stop whatever he was doing and come in the room; I can only assume he came because he liked the sound of it. It seemed to energize him the same way a rock concert might a human. He would often attack his scratching post or claw the stairs, then flop down and listen for a while. My new cat Brrt does not like live music and leaves the room if I pick up a uke.