When science meets music: Florida’s oyster decline is being told through jazz | Florida

A university professor has put the research of his team on the fate of the decline in Florida’s oyster population to music, aimed at informing a new receptive audience of the “catastrophic” scale of the crisis.

Heather O’Leary, professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida (USF) in Saint Petersburg, has teamed up with student composers and teachers of his music department to create oysters is not sure, a sweet jazz alternative to chew data in a “boring” technical report.

The arrangement, she said, “uses the universal language of music” to express the impact of the surge, the loss of habitat, the climate crisis and the propagation of chemicals forever on the fragiles of Florida oysters.

“You would probably not spend your Saturday morning or Friday evening to search in some of these government databases, but you already have the tools of your body as a person hearing, or by looking or creating art as a visual person to perceive a game,” she said.

“If you watch someone sing or dance, some parts of your brain light up as if you dance or sing yourself, and through it, deeper forms of connection are made. These coastal threats are something to which we can all relate.

O’Leary said that there was no intention of shedding light on the collapse in the oyster reefs of Florida, which led the managers of the fish and the fauna suspended the oyster harvest in 2020 for at least a period of five years.

“My answer to this is that we need a feeling of what is called radical optimism, because when things become too dark, people are only human-they have to turn away, they need a break,” she said.

The creative process featured graduate students in marine sciences working with their music school counterparts, guided by music teacher Matt McCutchen, to interpret the data in a ready -made room that will be presented live in January during the next USF concert.

“Music graduates know global warming, climate change, climate chaos, all that, but they have never really plunged into science. It is simply not the flavor of the intellectual interest they have,” said O’Leary.

“When they are sitting there speaking with marine scientists, who immerse themselves to see and feel with their fingers what it does when you know that the fabric takes off from coral, it’s electrifying.”

In addition to the next live performance, the project will include scores, illustrations created by students and a video clip. The composition of the Oyster follows a similar and similar collaboration on the red tide of Florida and the pests of harmful algae, which, according to O’Leary, began as “a joyful parallel project”, but which it quickly carried out could become a powerful medium.

“Students are thinking about time and change scales, on clicks and clacks that are in an article on coral, the more funky saxophone types that you think when you think of the dishes of dead fish,” she said.

“There is like this fundamental and very experiential somatic type.

“But if you experience with” What color would be this number? ” Or “what type of instrument would what I feel when I see this statistic?” Is it more creative.

O’Leary said that the music of the Florida oyster crisis can resonate in the response to the urgency of the world climate.

“All over the world, we all have our concerns, things like having the right amount of healthy and safe water for ourselves and our families and neighbors,” she said.

“So, to do it in a way where it is” I am not an authoritarian scientist “but rather” come and play with me “, this is how we are progressing on these things. It invites more people in the tent of being good listeners.”