A Cat’s Sense of Hearing: A Happy Cat Expert Explains
Have you ever wondered how good a cat’s hearing is? This blog is the fifth of a five-part series delving into how cats experience and use each of their five senses. We’ve already looked at their sense of vision, touch, taste, and smell, and this time we’re exploring everything there is to know about how cats experience sound!
Hear We Go Again…
As we mentioned in the first blog on vision, a cat’s hearing range vs humans’ is much wider and more advanced. While humans can hear sounds within a range of 8.5 octaves, cats can hear 10.5 octaves. Due to the mobility of their ears, cats can also localise the source of sound easily. This gives cats the broadest range of hearing among all mammals.
Auditory signals have greater value to cats for communication than visual ones because they may be exchanged at a greater distance. A cat’s hearing is important for numerous types of communication, such as prey location, parent-young communication, and feline-human communication.
A cat’s hearing range has a particularly important function in nature. Many of the species preyed upon by cats are rodents which rely on ultrasonic sounds to interact with each other. Cats can hear these sounds over a wide distance and can thereby identify where their prey is located.
Anatomy of a Cat’s Hearing
The pinnae, or external parts of a cat’s ear, are highly moveable and shaped to amplify sounds. This allows cats to better identify the location of the sound. Additionally, the variability in ear position also projects information to other cats about the emotional state of the sender cat.
The external ear gives way to the middle ear, where the tympanum (eardrum) and the only bones of the auditory canal are located. Then, we find the inner ear, where a specialised fluid fills the auditory canals to help transmit sounds to the tiny hair cell receptors. These structures are essential for transmitting sounds to the cat’s auditory cortex in the brain for processing.
Understanding a Cat’s Vocalisations
Cats make some sounds with their mouth open and others with their mouths closed; and they all have specific meanings.
- Mouth Closed: Cat sounds made with the mouth closed include the purr and the trill. The purr is a friendly greeting and care-soliciting call that typically occurs during amicable social interactions, or when ill or injured. The trill is a greeting call.
- Mouth Open: Sounds made with the mouth open and gradually closing include a large variety of meows. Meows are also amicable greeting calls, uttered in a variety of situations or interactions with other cats, dogs, and humans. Conversely, sounds made with the mouth held open in a relatively constant position are usually related to aggression. These include the growl, yowl, snarl, hiss, spit, and shriek. It is not difficult to hear the difference between the types of sounds.
In nature, vocal communication among cats is only used during agonistic, mating, or mother-kitten encounters. Domestic cats employ vocalisations much more frequently when humans are present than during inter-cat communication. This fact supports a learned component of this behaviour. Generally, meows are attention-seeking vocalisations in interspecific settings and are higher pitched (more pleasant).
Purr-fect Pitch – Do Cats Listen to Music?
Just like in other species, research has been conducted to determine whether cats enjoy music or prefer certain sounds to others, as well as whether sounds can have a calming effect on cats.
According to a 2015 study by Snowdon et al., cats were more interested in music made specifically for cats than human music. The rhythms of these melodies were based on a cat’s heart rate and walking cadence, their tones were more in the natural vocal and hearing range of felines and were similar to purring or suckling tones, and the harmonies were based on natural feline affiliative interactions. Other studies have shown that cats hearing music can help to reduce stress scores. So, the use of appropriate music can actually have a physiologic benefit to cats! These findings have great value in veterinary medicine when devising treatment plans for cats with anxiety disorders.
Wrapping Up
The sense of hearing in cats is very important for communication: not only between cats, but between cats and humans, and even for prey location or predator avoidance. A cat’s hearing covers a broader acoustic range than people’s, and the shape and moveability of their ears allow for hearing over a far distance, which is beneficial in nature.
To help communicate, cats create a variety of vocal sounds that often vary between individuals and between situations. These sounds are often paired with specific movements of the ears or mouth, which further helps the listener interpret the vocalisations.
Cats even have different music preferences, which may help veterinarians improve anxiety disorders from which cats may suffer. To be certain, a cat’s sense of hearing is more complex and important for so much more than just listening for the can opener to signify dinner being served!
Are you interested in learning more about how your cat experiences the world around them? Discover our other blogs in the series, from exploring a cat’s sense of smell, their unique vision, how they experience taste, and what touch feels like! You can also follow our other Happy Cat Expert articles, as well as stay informed with the latest tips and Q&As about caring for your cat, by signing up to our newsletter.
Additional Resources:
Brown S, Bradshaw J. Communication in the domestic cat: within- and between-species. In The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour (3rd edition), ed D Turner and P. Bateson. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press 2014
Carlson, N. R. (2012). Physiology of behavior. Pearson Higher Ed.
Crowell-davis S, Curtis T, Knowles R. 2004. Social organization in the cat: a modern understanding. JFMS, 6, 19-28.
Fay R, Popper A. Comparative Hearing: mammals. Springer handbook of auditory research series. Springer-Verlag. NY 1994.
Hampton, A., Ford, A., Cox III, R. E., Liu, C. C., & Koh, R. (2020). Effects of music on behavior and physiological stress response of domestic cats in a veterinary clinic. Journal of feline medicine and surgery22(2), 122-128.
Houpt, K. A. (2018). Domestic animal behavior for veterinarians and animal scientists. John Wiley & Sons.
Snowdon, C. T., Teie, D., & Savage, M. (2015). Cats prefer species-appropriate music. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 166, 106-111.
Turner, D 2017. A review of over three decades of research on cat-human and human-cat interactions and relationships. Behavioural processes, 141, 297-304 Google drive.
Yeon, S. C., Kim, Y. K., Park, S. J., Lee, S. S., Lee, S. Y., Suh, E. H., Lee, H. J. (2011). Differences between vocalization evoked by social stimuli in feral cats and house cats. Behavioural processes87(2), 183-189.
