Owner Plays Music at Home-Then Their ‘Opinionated' Cat Responds

A remote worker who started playing music to try to focus while working has revealed how stunned she was after her cat's dramatic reaction to the choice of song.

Ambrosia Short, 26, was working from home in Washington State when she decided to put some music on in the background. Although it helps her concentrate, it turns out that her 8-year-old cat, Bjørn, was not so keen.

Indeed, the feline has never really been a fan of music in general. He is certainly not afraid to show his feelings either, as Short told Newsweek that he is “a very opinionated and dramatic little guy.”

Having learned to communicate with 19 speech buttons so far, Bjørn managed to tell his owner exactly what he thought of her music taste by hitting the buttons for “noisy” and “ouch.”

Short said: “Bjørn has always hated when I play music. I work from home, though, so I usually have music playing while I work because it helps me concentrate. Before he had the ‘noisy' button, he would just press ‘mad' whenever I turned music on. Once he learned ‘noisy,' he started using that instead.

“This new combination of words honestly shocked me. He was trying to tell me that it wasn't just annoying him, it was actually hurting his ears because he knew that would make me stop playing it immediately.”

As a result, Short turned the music off completely to appease her fussy feline.

This hilarious moment was captured in a video and shared on Bjørn's dedicated TikTok account (@bjornsbuttons). Internet users cannot get enough of the cat's evident distaste, and the clip has gone viral with over 600,000 views and more than 59,000 likes on TikTok at the time of writing.

Many commenters reached out to laud Bjørn for being so strong-minded and for his clear comedic timing.

“He's never liked music, honestly. Maybe it was too loud, or maybe he's just more of a classical music guy while I'm over here playing rap.

“Usually when he presses ‘noisy,' I just turn the volume down, but when he said, ‘noisy ouch,' I didn't want to risk hurting his ears because he definitely is not shy about telling us how he feels,” Short said.

Bjørn has already mastered so many speech buttons, including the words for “cups,” “snack,” “no,” “later,” “mom,” and, of course, “love you.”

Short said that she taught him the button for “ouch” to help whenever Bjørn got hurt or was not feeling well. Thankfully, that does not happen very often, but Bjørn does have Intervertebral Disc Disease (IVDD), so he uses the button whenever that causes him trouble.

“It took a while to model as he doesn’t hurt often because his IVDD is extremely well managed, so he more learned it by me using it when I stubbed my toes or fell,” Short continued.

In the days since the TikTok video went viral, many people took to the comments to praise the cat's intelligence.

One comment reads: “It's not even regular noisy, it's noisy OUCH.”

Another TikTok user joked: “this album is trash, I much prefer their earlier stuff.”

A third person replied: “I'd be so offended.”

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This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 7:23 AM.