Whiskas' radio station plays music designed to calm your cat

It's Take Your Cat to the Vet day in Canada today, and feline owners will know that this can be a stressful day: most cats really hate going in the car.

To help with this, Whiskas and agency BBDO Toronto have created Calm Cat Radio, an online radio station specifically designed to make kitties more chilled out on the journey. The aim is to increase vet visits--which many cat owners put off because it's just so painful.

The station plays a continuous stream of music created by "species-specific" musician David Teie.
Each track is composed using a series of noises designed to have a calming effect on your cat. "All the music we hear is designed for humans, based on our vocalizations and development. Based on that understanding of composition, it only makes sense that if you use the same recipe used in human music but use ingredients that have been tailored to another species, you can create effective music for that species," says Teie.

It's fascinating stuff: the theory is that while humans respond so viscerally to the beats of music because we were exposed to our mother's pulse while our brains were developing in the womb, cats are not exposed to the mother's pulse because the cat's brain is only one eighth the size at birth of what it will be at 10 weeks. Instead, Teie used the sound of suckling for milk in place of the pulse in the music he created for cats. His theory has been corroborated by an independent study conducted by the University of Wisconsin and published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.