Pitch Purr-fect

When David Teie’s new album comes out next month, he’s not looking for screaming fans. Contented purring will do.

The UMD School of Music lecturer and National Symphony Orchestra cellist has created a variety of songs just for cats. He says his music, which has a distinctly New Age, melody-less feel, will entertain them while their owners are away at work or calm them during car rides to the vet.

“There have been many tests of music on animals that basically come up dry,” Teie says. “They don’t give a damn about human music. It’s like putting a dog behind the wheel of a car to see if it likes the ergonomic design.”

Teie is a pioneer in the field of species-specific music, starting by composing for tamarin monkeys (which landed him in the New York Times’ top ideas of 2009). He then shifted to household pets, and after a flurry of national media attention when he released his initial pieces of cat music, he decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign last fall.

His fundraising goal to create a full-length album was $20,000. He wound up collecting more than $240,000.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have been surprised. There are more than 36 million cat owners in the United States. Most will buy plenty of toys and scratchers to try to please their finicky felines (never mind that they often prefer empty boxes and shopping bags), and the truly dedicated might splurge on $500 litter boxes that complement their decor and $5,000 “catios” that provide outdoor time without the danger of escape.

At least 10,000 of them were willing to shell out for Teie’s tunes, and the Kickstarter windfall helped him hire other musicians and book an actual recording studio rather than use his bathroom at home.

Plus, it allowed him to start exploring music for other species. Alexandra Horowitz, who runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, reached out to Teie to collaborate on creating music for dogs.

“I liked the idea of making music attuned to the particular sensory and communication channels of the species,” she says.

Teie’s initial musical partners were honking geese. At least that’s what his family said when they dissuaded Teie from continuing with the saxophone as a child, claiming his playing was attracting flocks to their back yard in Minnesota.

But his musical family encouraged him to sing and eventually take up the cello. He studied at the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University and in London on a Fulbright scholarship before joining the NSO in 1984. He dedicated himself to his craft, but on the side, always sought to develop a deeper understanding of music.

“I had put together this theory of how music affects human emotions,” he says. “Any good theory is testable, and one test was that I should be able to write music that’s effective for other species, based on their development and vocalizations.”

Human music often uses a pulsing beat as its base, mimicking a mother’s heartbeat heard in the womb, and seeks to recreate sounds like moans or laughter through instruments, Teie says. Species-specific music similarly pulls from the formative cues in the animal’s life. For cats, this includes suckling sounds, purring, scratching and more, which he creates using both human instruments and other random objects like walnut shells (he never includes actual animal sounds, believing they will too quickly become desensitized to them).

Ironically, he is allergic to most household pets, so he’s relied on his research partners at the University of Wisconsin to show that cats respond more strongly to music composed for them, rather than humans. (Their findings were published last year in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science.) Anecdotal feedback from across the Internet (including Instagram-famous felines like Nala, City the Kitty and Bacon) helps confirm their findings.

“My cat Tiger came from a home where he was tormented daily and never loved. He has severe anxiety and trust issues,” backer Tichery Tich wrote in a comment on Kickstarter. “I played the sample for him, he is sleeping on the floor next to my PC and is resting peacefully. Thank you! You are a saint among humans.”

“I work at a cat kennel, and I can’t wait to have more tools to tame feral, scared and fractious cats!” wrote Sonja Millar, another backer. “Wow, can I notice a mood difference almost instantly. I can’t wait (for the album)!”

There are skeptics out there, of course—some include his fellow musicians, who haven’t taken much of an interest in his extracurricular activities—but that doesn’t bother him.

As he says on Kickstarter, “The proof is in the purrs.”

To pre-order the album, visit musicforcats.com.