clicks · chirp · squeak · wandering dot
Real cats key off a handful of sounds and one kind of motion: a
sharp tongue-click ("bsk bsk bsk"), a bird's chirp, a
rodent's squeak, and a small bright thing darting around
unpredictably. This page synthesizes all four, live, with Web
Audio and a canvas dot — no recordings. Turn the volume up, hold
your screen toward the cat, and see what happens.
Clicks are a short burst of noise through a narrow bandpass around 3-4.5kHz, four in a row — the same cadence as saying "bsk bsk bsk bsk" out loud. Chirp sweeps a sine tone up then down like a tweet. Squeak is a fast descending triangle tone, pitched above the chirp so the two stay distinguishable. All lures interleaves every sound into one longer cycle instead of stacking them at once.
The dot in the stage above wanders to a new random point every couple of seconds and eases toward it, the way an actual laser pointer jitters rather than glides — some cats track it right off a screen. Effectiveness on any given cat is, scientifically speaking, not guaranteed.