About

Who makes this

PurrPlay is built by Djasha, a product designer and engineer, as a solo project — research, design, mobile app, backend and this site. There is no team and no external funding, which is worth stating plainly because it tells you exactly how much scrutiny the work has had.

It is published by Djasha Tech FZE, a Free Zone Establishment registered in the United Arab Emirates. That is the entity you are contracting with under theterms of use, and the data controller named in theprivacy policy.

I am not a veterinarian and not an animal behaviourist. That is precisely why this site cites published work rather than offering opinion, and why the app refuses to diagnose anything.

The editorial standard

Every behavioural claim on this site has to clear four tests:

1. It traces to published work. The sound explainers cite peer-reviewed sources, listed on each page and collected below.
2. Contested things are labelled contested. Cat chattering is a good example: the leading explanations are frustration and involuntary excitement, and the prey-mimicry hypothesis is still debated. The page says that rather than picking the tidiest answer.
3. Absence of evidence is stated, not filled. There is no good evidence that a recorded purr calms a cat, so the Resting page says so instead of implying otherwise.
4. No claim is made about your individual cat. The research describes populations. Your cat is a sample of one, which is the entire reason the app keeps a journal.

What this site will never say

• That an app can translate a cat's meow into words. It cannot.
• That PurrPlay can detect illness, pain, or a behavioural disorder.
• That any particular cat will respond to any particular sound.
• That the conflict sounds — hissing, growling, fighting — are safe to play at an animal. They are documented for recognition only.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, or a source has been superseded, I want to know. Send it through the support page with the page and the source, and I will correct it and note the change.

Full bibliography

Every source cited across the sound explainers, in one place. Each category page lists the subset relevant to it.

1. Bradshaw, J. (2016). Sociality in cats: A comparative review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior.
2. Hampton, A., Ford, A., Cox III, R. E., Liu, C., & Koh, R. (2019). Effects of music on behavior and physiological stress response of domestic cats in a veterinary clinic. Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery.
3. Kogan, L. R., Schoenfeld-Tacher, R., & Simon, A. A. (2012). Behavioral effects of auditory stimulation on kenneled dogs. Journal of Veterinary Behavior.
4. Merola, I., & Mills, D. S. (2016). Behavioural signs of pain in cats: An expert consensus. PLoS ONE, 11(2), e0150040.
5. Monteiro, B. P., & Steagall, P. V. (2019). Chronic pain in cats: Recent advances in clinical assessment. Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice, 49(4).
6. Nicastro, N., & Owren, M. J. (2003). Classification of domestic cat (Felis catus) vocalizations by naive and experienced human listeners. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 117(1), 44–52.
7. Prato-Previde, E., Cannas, S., Palestrini, C., et al. (2020). What’s in a meow? A study on human classification and interpretation of domestic cat vocalizations. Animals, 10(12), 2390.
8. Schötz, S., van de Weijer, J., & Eklund, R. (2017). Melody matters: An acoustic study of domestic cat meows. Proceedings of Fonetik 2017.
9. Snowdon, C. T., Teie, D., & Savage, M. (2015). Cats prefer species-appropriate music. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 166, 106–111.
10. Vitale, K. R., Behnke, A. C., & Udell, M. A. R. (2019). Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans. Current Biology, 29(18), R864–R865.

The wider bibliography behind the product research, including market and veterinary-care figures, is held in the project repository atcase_study/research/citations.md.