[stormbrew]

This is really more of a comment on a lot of the replies to this comment than the comment itself:

Something to keep in mind is that cats have a very broad but different hearing range from humans. Their central frequency range of hearing overlaps with human speech but doesn't entirely cover it on the low end. So if your voice is low, you might need to raise your pitch a bit to help the cat recognize it as vocalization or differentiate it.

And they also don't really naturally communicate with vocalizations (unlike dogs, I believe); cat to cat communication is through other means. They literally learned to meow to talk to us because we don't understand their communication methods (sometimes, but not always, because we lack the senses to do so). So I think that's something to keep in mind if you feel like your cat is being obtuse: they're literally working pretty hard to make you understand them, actually.

So like, it's not that surprising that sometimes they just don't want to put in the effort. You'd probably feel the same way.

[hooande]

There are many stray cats in my neighborhood and I see them communicate vocally all the time. Mothers definitely call audibly to locate their kittens, and vice versa. They'll often call out to each other as adults, I think for mating?

These cats do a thing where they get inches from each other's faces and make a very loud, very long moaning sound. I imagine it's something in the local gene pool (my neighbor has been feeding strays for over a decade, I hate it)