fair play to her, it is not easy to record a cat meowing, as they often can sense if any recording equipment is aroudn) one of our cats (normally a noisy one) would go totally silent no matter what sort of recording equipment I used, even if I tried to use analogue tape in case the minidisc gave a high frequency he could hear…
538 vocalisations from three domestic cats were collected and used in a phonetic pilot study in order to test some recording and analysis methods normally used with human speech.
Based on auditive analysis, the vocalisations were categorised into five types and analysed for duration and F0. The most common type was a combined murmur and miaow. Similar
mean type durations were found in all three cats. Mean, minimum and maximum F0 showed an overall high variability, due to the large number of intonation patterns used in each
type. One might speculate that cats signal paralinguistic – perhaps even linguistic – information by varying their F0. Neither the recording techniques nor the analysis tools used here
were judged to be optimal for cat vocalisations. Future work includes a larger study of cat vocalisations, including intonation and formants, with adapted recording and analysis methods.
(warning this is 8 megabyte file, don’t click on the link if you are on a smartphone)
http://person2.sol.lu.se/SusanneSchotz/Publications_files/Schoetz_2012%3DDomesticCatVocalisations.pdf
