The song is BanYa's "Beethoven Virus" — the one from Pump It Up. Its own original is Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 8, the "Pathétique", third movement. I set five thousand years of us and the plague to the twelve-minute extended version.
At first I put a caption on each era: "the wrath of god", "bad air", "germs", "virus". Looking at them again, they were all just labels. None of them said anything.
Then I looked the word up. Virus is classical Latin. For two thousand years it meant poison, slime, snake venom; Roman writers used it for anything disgustingly fluid. In 1898 Martinus Beijerinck found something that passed through a filter fine enough to stop every bacterium, and he reached for that old word. The word stayed the same. Only its meaning changed.
The point of the video was that the thing only changed shape — and the word had already done exactly that. So I replaced every caption. In 3000 BC there is no name at all, only a tally of the dead. In 1347 it is VIRVS. In 1876, VIRUS. And at the end a green cursor is still typing virus_ .
The audio was cut off at 12.8 kHz. I restored it up to 21.6 kHz before using it.
I gathered the pieces made on the same terms into one playlist, called History, Give or Take. Some of it is documented history, some is a what-if built on a real war, and one is a joke about a pistol that really was in the Soyuz survival kit. Which is which is written in the playlist description.