VALLEY WEEKEND : MUSIC : Valley Dog and Cat Lover Turns Pet Sounds Into the Howlelujah Chorus : If Christmas carols ‘sung’ by felines top your list of holiday hits, Mike Spalla hopes you’ll be itching to buy his new recording featuring canine performers.

The first, and perhaps only, thing you need to know about Mike Spalla is that he does not consider it odd that he earns a living by coaxing household pets to sing.

As the creator of “Jingle Cats,” Spalla has meticulously recorded thousands of purrs, growls, meows and barks over the last five years. This racket has served as grist for three compact discs that feature cats and dogs approximating dozens of Christmas tunes.

“A good argument for SPCA vigilante squads, gunning for anybody with a pet and a digital sampler,” wrote The Times’ Chris Willman in a 1993 review.

Yet for every person who listens to “Jingle Cats” and hears only screeching, there are cat lovers who hear a symphony.

“Meowy Christmas,” the cats’ 1993 debut, reached as high as 86th on SoundScan’s national chart and spawned a sequel, “Here Comes Santa Claws.” This month, as “Jingle Cats” approach 500,000 in worldwide sales, Spalla has released a canine compilation titled “Jingle Dogs: Christmas Unleashed.”

The albums--along with a mail-order catalog featuring “Jingle Cats” T-shirts, buttons and stickers--have transformed Spalla’s odd bent into a cottage industry. And though he could probably sit back and reap the financial rewards of his efforts for many Christmases to come, the soft-spoken, 36-year-old North Hills man shows no intentions of letting up.

“I’ve been working hard to come up with new albums. We have a brand new video, too,” he said by telephone from a promotional tour of Japan, where “Jingle Cats” ranked behind only Mariah Carey in last year’s holiday sales.

It all started when Spalla, a composer and cat lover, used an electronic keyboard to assemble computerized meows into a rough version of “Jingle Bells.” Family and friends found the tape amusing, but Spalla was not satisfied. Armed with degrees in music and marketing from USC, he set out to make cats his career.

By the Christmas of 1991, he had recorded “Jingle Bells” with 40 actual meows and released a single that played on Power 106 and KIIS-FM. Next, he quit his job at the family production company and began work on an album.

The task proved painstaking. Needing to compile enough meows to match each musical note, Spalla hid a microphone in his kitchen to catch the dinner-time cries of his own handful of cats. He stalked alleys. He visited relatives and friends, teasing their pets with silvery tassels and fuzzy toys.

“I was getting a little nervous,” his wife, Jennifer, recalled. “I’d come home and he’d say, ‘I’ve got a great song. You’ve got to hear it.’ It would be ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies’ will all these cats meowing. I’d think, ‘My God, what is he doing?’ ”

In 1993, “Meowy Christmas” scored an instant hit at music stores nationwide.

“It was one of those new things like ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,’ ” said an official from the Tower Records chain. “When it first came out, it was really popular.”

While the debut album has fallen out of Tower’s nationwide Top 100 this holiday season, it remains among the Top 10 at the chain’s Sunset Boulevard location. And the Northridge store reported selling 64 copies during the first week of December.

Such success makes perfect sense to Spalla. To him, the “Jingle Cats” and “Jingle Dogs” are neither commercial opportunism nor a simple novelty. To him, they are a valid musical concept.

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When confronted with criticism such as The Times’ review, Spalla responded: “I saw that, but I thought [Willman] was just kidding.” And even those people who fail to recognize the nuances of the work, he said, “think this is really hilarious.” He remains convinced that they are laughing with him, not at him.

So he has released “Christmas Unleashed,” which arrived in Los Angeles music stores last week. The compact disc features his two dogs, Rocket and Flee. The cats were brought in to sing backup vocals, providing high notes. Spalla sees the combination of howls and meows as musically innovative.

At the very least, it landed him in Tokyo earlier this month, where Japanese promoters showered him with applause and gifts.

“The people here are really gentle, artistic, sincere,” Spalla said. “They have a lot of appreciation for spirit. I think ‘Jingle Cats’ fits in really well with that.”