Fibrous “pads” in the vocal cords allow cats to make low-frequency sounds, which they don’t seem to consciously control
One of the most delightful sounds to a cat lover is their feline friend’s rumbling noise when they get a little scritch behind the ears. Yet how cats produce their contented purrs has long been a mystery.
Domestic cats are small, with most weighing about 4.5 kilograms, and researchers had puzzled over how these animals manage to generate the low-frequency vocalizations—typically between 20 and 30 hertz —involved in purring. Such frequencies are usually only observed in much larger animals,, which have far longer vocal cords. And whereas big cats such as lions and tigers are capable of loud roars, domestic cats are only able to produce low-frequency purring.
But in the 1970s, scientists proposed that purring was different. The so-called active muscle contraction hypothesis holds that domestic cats actively contract and relax their laryngeal muscles about 30 times per second in order to purr. The idea, based on measurements of electrical activity in the laryngeal muscles in purring cats, caught on and has been a common explanation for cat purring ever since.
The team was able to produce purring in all of the larynxes—a “great surprise,” says lead author Christian Herbst, a voice scientist who holds dual appointments at the University of Vienna and Shenandoah University. Without any active neural control, all eight larynges produced self-sustaining oscillations at frequencies between 25 and 30 Hz—suggesting purring doesn’t necessarily require active muscle contractions.
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