Melody matters: An acoustic study of domestic cat meows in six contexts and four mental states

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1 Division of Logopedics, Phoniatrics and Audiology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
2 Humanities Lab, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
3 Department of Culture and Communication, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27926v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Animal Behavior, Anthropology
Keywords
domestic cat, meow vocalisations, acoustic, fundamental frequency, duration, contexts, mental states
Copyright
© 2019 Schötz et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Schötz S, van de Weijer J, Eklund R. 2019. Melody matters: An acoustic study of domestic cat meows in six contexts and four mental states. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27926v1

Abstract

This study investigates domestic cat meows in different contexts and mental states. Measures of fundamental frequency (f0) and duration as well as f0 contours of 780 meows from 40 cats were analysed. We found significant effects of recording context and of mental state on f0 and duration. Moreover, positive (e.g. affiliative) contexts and mental states tended to have rising f0 contours while meows produced in negative (e.g. stressed) contexts and mental states had predominantly falling f0 contours. Our results suggest that cats use biological codes and paralinguistic information to signal mental state.

Author Comment

This is intended for the second international workshop on Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots (VIHAR 2019) collection.