What do Maine Coons sound like?

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Maine Coons have a reputation for chirping and trilling more than other cats. Don't believe that all Maine Coons sit around the living room chirping and trilling like birds. They don't. In fact, I am unconvinced that Maine Coons chirp and trill much more than any other domestic cat. 

Some individuals might have a tendency to make a chirping-like sound from time to time. That is about as far as I am going to go in restating this anecdotal information. However, there is also a tendency for people who write about the Maine Coon to restate what has already been stated on another website and you just build up this fiction into fact.

Harry a ginger Maine Coon who talks like other domestic cats
Harry a ginger Maine Coon who talks like other domestic cats. Screenshot.

Gloria Stephens in her book Legacy of the Cat makes no mention of how Maine Coons sound or the kind of vocalisations that they make. If Maine Coons genuinely chirped and trilled and were truly noted for it, she would have mentioned it. Gloria Stephens is a former cat show judge and breeder. She might even be a current cat show judge and breeder but she knows her purebred cats.

Online you will find some videos of Maine Coons talking. There is one on this page. Harry is a ginger tabby Maine Coon. He has his own individual way of meowing and talking like all cats. He's charming but I can't say that the sounds that he is making are particular to the Maine Coon cat breed.

And that I think is the point I wish to make. The way a cat sounds is individual to that cat. You will get some trends such as Siamese cats having a raucous type of meow. And the British shorthair having the silent meow. But you will find random bread cats having raucous meows and silent meows too.

So, what do Maine Coon sound like? They sound like any other domestic cat in general but they may have a tendency to chirp and trill more than perhaps other cats of other breeds. I can't be sure.

I have access to many recordings (440) of Maine Coon vocalisations taken by researchers and the sounds of European Shorthairs and all of them seem like perfectly standard domestic cat sounds. 

The study is called: Cat Meows: A Publicly-Available Dataset of Cat Vocalizations and the database is on the Zenodo website. I have downloaded the audio files and played some and the sounds are ordinary as explained. This does not surprise me.


And below is another recording from this dataset:

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