Phonetics experts at Lund University, a school in Sweden, have set an objective of five years to break the barriers of human and cat communication.
Even if you’re not a crazy cat lady the idea we could be having conversations with our cats by 2021 is a pretty exciting thought.
Five years is a big step from Amazon’s recent projected human to pet communication time line of 10-years.
[Susanne Schötz] (https://www.nowtolove.com.au/parenting/family/hilarious-images-of-cats-shaking-off-water-16463 |target=”_blank”) who is a lead researcher on the study explains the team’s confidence in the timeline.
“It seems that cats can vary the intonation or melody consciously, perhaps to convey a certain message or increase the urgency of a message or to convey emotion.”
“I have found with my cats they have a different sound in their melody when they are sad compared to when they are happy.”
The team are hoping to encourage better communication between humans and their pets and will be looking for ways to improve the process, for example, looking to see if cats prefer pet–directed speech or prefer to be spoken to like human adults.
Lund Unversity is working with other universities around Sweden to investigate if cats from different areas have different accents.
The project is called Melody in Human-Cat Communication
(Meowsic), and is working to investigate the communication between humans and domestic cats, including voice, melody (intonation) and speaking style – in human speech as well as in cat vocalisations – influence the vocal communication.
let’s hope those cheeky little fur-babies have something nice to say.
You can just never tell when it comes to cats.
