"Biomusic" gets used loosely. Online it often means chill-out tracks with birdsong layered over a synth pad. In research and experimental music it means something more specific and more interesting: music built from living things, either from the sounds animals make or from the signals our own bodies produce. There is also a scientific field with a similar name, biomusicology, that studies music itself as a biological trait.
This guide covers all three, with the real people and projects behind them.
Nature as composer: birds and whales
Composers have borrowed from birdsong for centuries, but the French composer Olivier Messiaen took it further than anyone. Between 1956 and 1958 he wrote Catalogue d'oiseaux, thirteen piano pieces, each built around a bird found in France and the landscape it lives in. He wrote down the songs himself, in the field, in ordinary musical notation. He was candid that the result passed through his own ears and imagination, so the pieces are portraits rather than recordings.
In 1972 the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara went the other way and put the birds in the orchestra. His Cantus Arcticus, subtitled "Concerto for Birds and Orchestra," uses tape recordings made near the Arctic Circle and on the bogs of Liminka in northern Finland. In the second movement, the song of a shore lark is slowed down until it becomes a ghostly, low lament. The finale is built around the calls of migrating whooper swans. It is probably Rautavaara's best-known work.
The most influential example didn't come from a composer at all. In the late 1960s, the biologist Roger Payne, working with Katy Payne and Scott McVay, studied recordings of humpback whales made by Frank Watlington and realized the animals were singing long, structured songs with repeating themes. Payne and McVay described them in a 1971 cover story in Science. A year earlier, the 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale had already brought the sound to the public, and it became a rallying point for the Save the Whales movement. Humpback song was later included among the greetings on the Voyager Golden Record, launched into space in 1977. You can hear what made people stop and listen on our whale sounds page.
Bernie Krause brought these ideas into ecology. A former member of the folk group The Weavers and an early Moog synthesizer player, he founded Wild Sanctuary to record and archive natural soundscapes. With ecologist Stuart Gage of Michigan State University, he helped give the new field of soundscape ecology its vocabulary: biophony for sounds made by living organisms, geophony for wind, water and other non-living sounds, and anthropophony for the noise humans make. His 2012 book The Great Animal Orchestra argues that a healthy habitat sounds like an orchestra, with species filling different frequency bands, and that you can hear an ecosystem decline. The dawn chorus and a field of crickets are biophony at its most familiar.
Music from the body
The second branch of biomusic turns the body's own signals into sound. The landmark piece is Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer, first performed in 1965 at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum. Developed with physicist Edmond Dewan, it placed EEG electrodes on the performer's scalp to pick up alpha waves, the slow rhythms that appear when the brain is relaxed with eyes closed. The amplified signal drove loudspeakers that set drums, gongs and other percussion vibrating around the room. It is generally regarded as the first piece in which brainwaves directly generate the sound, although later scholars point out that a fair amount of technical processing sat between brain and drum. Consumer EEG headsets have since made this kind of experiment far easier; we looked at one of them in our piece on the Emotiv EPOC headset.
The most moving use of the idea came from a children's hospital. At Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, biomedical engineers Stefanie Blain-Moraes and Elaine Biddiss developed a system they called "biomusic," which translates heart rate, breathing, skin temperature and skin conductance into real-time music. It was designed for children with profound multiple disabilities who cannot speak, gesture or use communication devices reliably. In a small 2013 study in Augmentative and Alternative Communication, three children, their families and seven staff members used it during everyday care. The researchers reported that hearing the children's changing physiological state seemed to strengthen how parents and staff saw each child as a person, and enriched their interactions.
A 2016 follow-up in Frontiers in Neuroscience by Cheung, Biddiss and colleagues tested whether the music carries real information. In that system, skin conductance drove the melody, skin temperature set the key, heart rate set the tempo and drumbeat, and breathing became a soft whoosh. After less than ten minutes of training, 16 student listeners could tell whether a clip came from an anxious or a relaxed child about 81 percent of the time, usually within about 12 seconds.
Sonification: listening to data
Both of these branches belong to a wider practice called sonification, which means representing data as sound. A Geiger counter's clicks are the classic example. Researchers now sonify everything from star data to molecules. In 2019, Markus Buehler's group at MIT published work in ACS Nano that mapped the 20 amino acids to tones derived from their molecular vibrations, turned protein structures into music, and used those compositions to help an AI system design new proteins.
Plant music sits at the playful end. Devices such as PlantWave clip electrodes to a leaf, read small fluctuations in its electrical signal and convert them into MIDI notes played by synthesizer sounds. The results can be lovely, but it helps to be clear about what they are: a sonification of a changing electrical reading, with the musical choices made by sound designers. The plant isn't composing.
Biomusicology: the science side
The musicologist Nils L. Wallin coined the term biomusicology in his 1991 book of the same name. It covers the study of music as a biological phenomenon: how and why music evolved, how the brain processes it, and how musical behavior compares across cultures and species. Much of the research in our article on how music affects your brain falls under this heading.
Is biomusic good for you?
Older articles, including an earlier version of this one, promised that biomusic relieves stress, sharpens concentration and balances emotions. There is no research on "biomusic" as a category that shows this. What does exist is research on music in general and on natural sounds, which we cover in why the sounds of nature are so relaxing. The honest summary is that many people find nature recordings calming, and that you are the best judge of what works for you.
The easiest way to explore biomusic is to listen: Messiaen's birds, Rautavaara's swans, the Paynes' whales. And if you want to build your own blend of living sounds, Noizio mixes 40+ ambient sounds, including whales, birds, crickets and a heartbeat, into soundscapes you can save. It is available for Mac and iOS, and on Android.