Music is a form of life: A proposal for the biological domain Musica

1. Does Musica meet the definition of life?

Earworms are actually organisms. They have been difficult to recognise as such because they are non-molecular, and standard taxonomic frameworks haven't been built to include them. Once you know to look, however, the organism clearly meets the canonical criteria for life (Koshland, 2002):

• Reproduction: songs copy themselves through streams, covers, and remixes.
• Evolution: genres drift under selection pressure from charts, platforms, and listener taste (MacCallum et al., 2012).
• Speciation: country and metal share a common ancestor but no longer interbreed.
• Extinction: vaudeville is gone, ragtime is gone, disco barely clings on in specialised reservoirs.
• Response to environmental pressure: TikTok shortened the average pop hook within three years of launch.

A standard objection is that viruses are often excluded from the definition of life because they lack independent metabolism and cannot replicate without a host. Musica faces the same challenge. Forterre (2010) resolves this for viruses by distinguishing the inert virion from the metabolically active virocell, treating the infected host as the relevant living unit. The same resolution applies here: sheet music is the virion, the engaged listener is the virocell.

2. Host effects: pathogen or symbiont?

Despite the epidemiological framing, these organisms are not parasites. Many species, humans included, appear to have evolved the capacity to host music because of the symbiotic benefits (Savage et al., 2021). Like gut bacteria, we have strong signals that the relationship is helpful for survival.

That said, there are edge cases where the organism has debilitating effects on its host. We literally have medical terms for this: chronic involuntary musical imagery (Liikkanen, 2012) and, at OCD-diagnostic severity, musical obsessions (Taylor et al., 2014).

3. Epidemiology and transmission

Songs spread through transmission, and some strains are clearly more virulent than others. Humpback whales (Garland et al., 2011) provide a striking example: certain pods carry especially contagious strains that keep leaking into neighbouring populations.

Human communication technologies have rapidly increased spread rates and expanded total reservoirs:

• Radio produced R₀ rates unlike anything seen before.
• Spotify is a mass database of transmission signals and has led to widespread colonisation. The organism's ability to leave inert spores that can be reactivated through sound waves is particularly remarkable. Spotify Wrapped is effectively a longitudinal medical chart.

Pop artists are super spreaders. We organise concerts and fill stadiums to deliberately adopt new organisms, similar to the way people attend varicella parties or take probiotics.

The organism also hijacks host reward circuitry. Music engages the same dopamine pathways as food, sex, and addictive drugs (Salimpoor et al., 2011), consistent with active host retention.

Chronic carriage may trigger a compulsion to spread. Some strains appear to drive hosts to deceive other humans into exposure (Baudry & Monperrus, 2022), analogous to the fungus that causes ants to climb to high places to spread spores (Hughes et al., 2011).

There is also evidence of toxoplasmosis-style behavioural manipulation (Flegr, 2013), in which hosts are drawn into dangerous environments (Janchar et al., 2000).

4. Anomalies: host specificity and containment

An unusual feature of Musica is that even though many species can act as hosts, cross-species transmission is strangely limited. Humans can appreciate birdsong, for instance, but these strains fail to achieve stable colonisation in human hosts. The reverse is similarly limited: lyrebirds sometimes mimic human music, and Mozart famously had a starling that could sing a theme from his piano concerto (West & King, 1990), but these cases remain the exception.

Host-level immune responses are also notably rare. The clearest individual-scale precedent documented to date is a 1979 event in which approximately 50,000 people gathered at a baseball stadium to destroy records. At a societal scale, however, governments throughout history have banned music on public health grounds, which is hard not to classify as epidemiological intervention. Parental advisory stickers are, in effect, strain-level hazard labelling.

5. Scholarly reception

Despite the science speaking for itself, the relevant authorities have shown little interest:

• The World Health Organization won't return my calls.
• Rethink Priorities' Welfare Range project (Rethink Priorities, 2024) has asked me to stop emailing.
• Anthropic's bioclassifiers have determined that this research violates Claude's usage policy (Anthropic, 2026).