John Bohlinger’s Last Call: Do Aliens Dream of Electric Guitars?

In the 2015 animated film Home, the heroine, voiced by Rihanna, plays Rihanna’s “Dancing in the Dark” for Oh, an affable alien whose tribe, the Boov, have overtaken the world. Oh hates the song, claiming it’s “not even music.” Yet, as the beat hits, his body betrays him, twitching and gyrating to the groove. Oh cries, “You have tricked me into listening to a debilitating sonic weapon. I am not in control of my own extremities!” It’s a cartoon, sure, but it nails a truth: Music, whether you’re human or Boov, grabs you by the soul—or at least the hips.

Play the first few bars of Chaka Khan and Rufus’s “Tell Me Something Good” or AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” and bodies move—doesn’t matter if it’s Tokyo, Nashville, or a yurt in Mongolia. This is not an exclusively human response. We can see both domesticated and wild animals move to music. Even plants, without the benefit of ears or a nervous system, respond to music.

So if music is the international language of Earth, what about beyond our planet? Just a few years ago, if you admitted you believed in alien life, the general public would act like you were crazy. But in these James-Webb-Telescope, Space-Force days, most agree that there is probably a whole lot outside of our little rock. That being established, one has to ask: Will life forms outside our world dig “Bohemian Rhapsody?”

Here’s the rub: Space is silent. Sound needs a medium—air, water, something—in which to travel. Space is a vacuum, so your Marshall stack’s wail dies before it leaves the stratosphere. But sound isn’t totally absent out there. In rare spots, like plasma clouds or planetary atmospheres, vibrations can carry. But even if the vibrations carry, is there anything or anyone there, and do they have ears?

Humans hear sound through ears tuned to 20–20,000 Hz, but some theorize aliens might sense sound differently—not through ears but via skin, picking up vibrations like a cosmic bass drop. That’s not much of a stretch when you consider that plants in lab experiments respond to music via cells called mechanoreceptors, growing faster when serenaded with Mozart. If ferns can vibe, why not E.T.?

Still, there’s no proof aliens have music or the brains to make it. Their sensory organs might be so alien that our 440 Hz-tuned melodies sound like static. Imagine a species evolved in a vacuum, communicating through light pulses like fireflies or electric fields like sharks. Or, if aliens have mastered sound waves to move pyramids or carve Petra in Jordan (as some fringe theories suggest), they might scoff at our use of music to shake our asses rather than build complex architecture.