Savage beasts, your music has arrived.
Turn on. Tune in. Chill out.
Animal-calming music that has already caught on to the tune of 30,000 CDs and garnered hundreds of testimonials now has a consumer electronics item to call its own.
On Feb. 14, the only music intentionally to have gone to the dogs was slated to break out into the consumer goods market with a $249.50 high-tech, one-piece speaker system made with dog, cat and horse hearing in mind.
The device ”“ about 18 inches high ”“ comes with something of a pedigree of its own: 30,000 pet-calming CD sales from Janet Marlow and sound-studio DNA for the speaker from Samuel Laufer.
Washington Depot-based Pet Acoustics”™ My Pet Speaker is being marketed at Amazon.com and at pet supply retailers in Fairfield County and across the New York border in Westchester County and in the Hudson Valley. Two-thousand were manufactured prior to the official launch. The unit plays music Marlow has composed with animals in mind or it can distill most music into tones and meter suitable for animals.
“It works,” said Erin Hubbard, office manager at the Litchfield Veterinary Hospital in Litchfield, which plays Marlow”™s music on CDs. “It”™s very soothing; it”™s very calming. We use it when patients are recovering from surgery and we find it relaxes them. We also use it in our small-dog and big-dog wards to promote relaxation. It”™s nice. I think it works on people, too.”
Prior to a business “light-bulb moment” that led to the speaker, Marlow was, and remains, a world-renowned concert and recording musician. She has sung at Lincoln Center and at Carnegie Hall, in several films, including a Woody Allen vehicle, and she founded the International Ten String Guitar Society and its accompanying festivals.
It was her cat”™s passing that led first to the music and eventually to the speaker system.
Osborn the cat”™s death over five bleak days in 2003 presented a void that Marlow first disliked and then could not ignore. The day after his death at age 15, Marlow composed her first piece of music exclusively to calm animals and, in turn, their masters.
Rather than guess at what animals liked, Marlow sent letters to animal behaviorists at universities around the world. One letter in particular hit pay dirt: studies on behavioral neuroscience specific to the hearing ranges of laboratory animals conducted at Ohio”™s University of Toledo”™s psychology department.
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She has since delved even deeper into the arenas of volumes and frequencies that are specific to dogs, cats and, the animal with the most humanlike of hearing ranges, horses. Horses are said to enjoy Marlow”™s 10-string guitar work on “Relaxation Music for Horses for Equine Well-Being,” one of several CDs she has composed and that have landed her in magazines and on national TV.
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Marlow”™s research revealed cats and dogs prefer similar music filled with long tones, while horses relate to shorter tones and a meter that matches their natural clip-clopping.
If you”™re thinking this pet-calming technology has been around for decades and it”™s called the radio (or the TV), Marlow with politeness to match her surety would say you are mistaken and that it can be counterproductive to leave Fido or Fluffy alone with tones directed at humans. The full spectrum and discordant meters that come via popular entertainment, if they calm at all, do so only in the arena of “white noise,” masking more distracting sounds outside. The white-noise masking is also a benefit of the Pet Acoustics speaker, but without the wake-up calls TV and radio inadvertently produce on a constant basis. “The frequencies that come from TV and radio can be very disturbing to animals”™ hearing,” Marlow said.
The idea spawned by Osborn was working; CD sales were on the rise. Enter Samuel Laufer and two cups of coffee.
Laufer is a lawyer by training, but now devotes his work to high-end audio equipment. His Laufer Teknik office in Washington Depot, Conn., is ringed with big speakers secured in glistening wooden boxes, as close in appearance to furniture as to speakers and bearing little resemblance to the speakers that find most living-room bookshelves.
A year ago, Laufer and Marlow, who had met through an unrelated business deal, had what both agree was a light-bulb moment. “We were having coffee and we were trying to figure a way to bring Janet”™s music to a broader audience,” Laufer said. “The idea was that it would be produced in a way that would really reflect the capabilities of the music. It was at that point that we conceived of a loudspeaker that was specifically designed for animals.”
“I call them soft orchestrations, almost like the soundtrack to a movie,” Marlow said of her animal music. “It’s like the background to a life. It”™s in the background, but it has a stream that alters the air. It moves air in a very soft way.”
And on the technical end, said Laufer, “The speaker is designed to limit the bandwidth of the sound that”™s produced. It limits the upper frequencies and it limits the lower frequencies. It focuses very much on the midrange so it is banded in a way that allows any music played in it to be contoured to be soothing for animals and for human beings.”
But it could be up to the animal as to whether that favorite Joni Mitchell CD will translate for Mr. Ed as well as does Marlow”™s music.
“What Janet does compositionally,” said Laufer, “is to take the rhythmic characteristics and the compositional elements and to try to tailor them to each animal”™s unique hearing.”
The “My Pet Speaker” has a port for iPhones, iPods and other devices to make use of a pair of downloadable pet music apps. The apps themselves can be tailored to the individual pet via a scroll menu.
“We”™re using music to bridge the human-animal bond,” Marlow said. “We”™re creating an environment through music that is powerful and meaningful. I have hundreds and hundreds of testimonies from people around the world who have used the music to great success. The idea is we want to create an environment that maintains balance and well-being for an animal in their environment.”
