[gregsadetsky]

You're not kidding, they're 8 kHz i.e. ""phone resolution""...

Interesting, this seems to be related to the Bluetooth microphone that they used:

"Thus, we adopted a very small and lightweight microphone placed under the cat’s throat through a collar"

The microphone is described in their paper [0]: "The signal is transmitted via Bluetooth [...] at a sampling frequency of 8 kHz."

Also: "As a consequence, the actual range of frequencies we could rely on is 0–4 kHz. We expected that the fundamental frequency emitted by cats falls within the range, whereas some higher-frequency harmonics were likely to be cut"

[0] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/9/8/543/htm

[Tabular-Iceberg]

Sounds like they were over-complicating things. Simply pointing a shotgun mic at the cat from a distance would have done the trick.

I don’t blame them, though, we do it all the time in software development.

[azalemeth]

Most outdoor shotgun mics I've seen have a nice furry wind screen affectionately known (in en-gb at least) as a "dead rat". Most indoor shotgun mics I've seen also have a double life as outdoor shotgun mics, and therefore come inside a 'dead rat'.

My cat will investigate anything pointed at him, and I'm pretty sure would love to see how dead the dead rat really is...

Rather than taking aim at the sampling rate, if anything I'd be more interested in being sure that they'd sampled up to the end of the frequency spectrum that cats can actually hear -- for birds at least the >30kHz part is important.