Far from being a novelty, dog-oriented music is fast becoming a successful new genre, with the production company RelaxMyDog at the forefront of the trend. Founded in 2011 by entrepreneur Amman Ahmed and producer Ricardo Henriquez, the service reaches an audience of 10 million users a month: 600 years’ worth of their content was streamed in September alone.[...]
Ahmed is coy when explaining the somewhat vague musical formula behind their success, though. It comprises, he says, of “a range of frequencies that the dogs can hear, combined with music that is designed to be relaxing to humans, since if the human is relaxed, that energy can be projected on to the dog also”. Rather than engaging in scientific research to influence their compositions, “the best research comes from actual users”, he says, who provide regular feedback through their YouTube channel’s 600,000 subscribers.
One such piece of feedback was that dogs were responding well to reggae music, which has led to a new series of dog reggae. This finding is backed up by a 2017 study conducted by the Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow. The research found that while classical music had an initial calming effect on the dogs, after a few days they became bored. Instead, reggae and soft rock came out as the best genres for reducing stress, barking and heart rates. The SPCA’s head of research, Gilly Mendes Ferreira, speculates this is because “those genres have a rhythm that is similar to the dogs’ own heart rate. When a puppy is feeling stressed it will snuggle into its mother and use her heartbeat as relaxation, so this music mimics that.”
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