(Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)Īs Teie and his family packed for a month’s vacation in Prague, he explained to his kids that he’d need to focus on his cat-music composing as if it were a 9-to-5 job. The National Symphony Orchestra’s David Teie watches his intended audience at the cat cafe Crumbs & Whiskers as he plays his experimental compositions for them. “I’m worried I might be a one-hit wonder,” Teie said. The trip to the cat cafe to market-test a new tune was less than encouraging. The only problem: It had been seven years since Teie wrote his cat-music hits, and he was afraid he might have lost his touch. Teie realized he needed to write an EP’s worth of cat songs, about 40 minutes, so he could sell it online. Music for cats.Īfter dashing off his first two cat tunes, Teie largely forgot about the project until, in February, the study was finally published and generated a flurry of attention. An animal we prize for its beauty but never truly manage to own. Music for a common pet that we struggle to connect with. Before Teie could serenade bored zoo elephants or calm stressed-out whales, he would need to write animal music that people might actually buy. The cellist dreamed of filling out his universal theory of music by writing music for all kinds of animals, but he couldn’t keep doing it for free. “I realized I was really on to something when I started getting invited to major scientific conferences,” Teie recalls. Amazingly, it worked: The monkeys relaxed to the more tranquil tunes Teie wrote for them, and they jumped around when researchers played Teie’s monkey “dance music,” according to a study published in Biology Letters in 2010. To test that theory, Teie teamed with University of Wisconsin psychology professor Charles Snowdon and tried out some of Teie’s monkey music on a colony of cotton-top tamarins. For instance, with their high-pitched voices and fast pulse, monkeys are going to respond best to music that is quite a bit higher and faster than music for humans. That’s also true for other animals, but the particulars can change, Teie posited. It’s no coincidence, says Teie, that our mother’s resting pulse is about the same pace as music we find relaxing, and that our favorite instruments, like the violin, tend to hover around the range of her voice. An accomplished cellist, Teie began writing music for animals back in 2003 to demonstrate his universal theory of music: The idea that music taps directly into our emotional core by remixing the sounds that marinated our developing brains in the womb. Teie’s foray into cat music composition didn’t surprise his colleagues at the National Symphony Orchestra. “It appears cats are responding to music if it’s properly designed and delivered in the cat idiom.” “As far as I know, it’s the first study showing that cats respond to music at all,” says Nick Dodman, director of the Animal Behavior Program at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. That’s pretty impressive, considering that just 38 percent responded positively to classical masterpieces such as J.S. “Rusty’s Ballad” and “Cozmo’s Air” prompted positive responses from 77 percent of cats in a study published in February in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. ![]() “If that had been my first test, I would have gone back to human music,” he said.īack in 2008, Teie wrote two songs that would have been major hits on the cat-music Billboard charts, if there were such a thing. Alas, he turned away and began to give himself a bath.Ī half-hour later, Teie left Crumbs & Whiskers deflated. The feather and ribbon wavers paused, waiting to see if Mitty would approach the speaker. A tuxedo cat named Mitty turned toward the music. Teie tapped his iPhone, triggering a cascade of high harp arpeggios and a melody he’d written reminiscent of birdsong. Besides, he was there to play music for cats, not make friends with them. He was too focused on setting up a speaker and a video camera. Teie, who had taken prophylactic benadryl before venturing into Crumbs & Whiskers, didn’t notice. How else to explain why, one August afternoon, a cat named Midnight sauntered past nearly a dozen people waving feathers and ribbons at a Georgetown cat cafe and parked himself at the feet of David Teie. Nothing attracts a cat like a person with a cat allergy. Does it work? We put it to the test with famous Internet cats. Composer David Teie arranged a song to make cats relaxed.
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