Songs and Science: Using Music as a Tool to Teach About Climate Change

I remember one of the first lessons I learned as a kid about personal responsibility when it comes to preserving the environment—a segment from a Barney episode that featured a song about not letting the water run while brushing your teeth. Admittedly, it still plays in my head from time to time whenever I’m standing over a sink brushing my teeth, or even doing the dishes. All that to say, the song did the trick.

As musicians, we all know how powerful music is as a vessel for improving social, emotional, and physical conditions. With so much discussion these days about human impact on climate, we also share a unique opportunity to apply that same musical power towards helping improve environmental conditions, even if only to increase awareness.

Through music, we can connect with our science, math, and even history counterparts to contribute to the narrative on nature and effectively promote change. Below are ideas for using music education as a tool to teach about caring for the environment, for students of all ages.

1. For Pre-School and Elementary-Aged Students

Establish an overall awareness and appreciation for the environment.

One essential step for younger students is to introduce the importance of the environment. This includes stepping outside of the classroom altogether. Students spend the majority of their school days indoors for classes, activities, and lessons, but not every aspect of music education needs to be conducted indoors.

Beyond the benefits of establishing appreciation, studies have shown that students who participate in occasional outdoor lessons have increased class engagement once they return indoors. Studies have also shown that more time spent in nature can boost short-term memory and restore mental energy. Additionally, developing individual appreciation for the environment will lead students to feel more of a personal responsibility to help preserve it.

Here are some ideas for using music to establish awareness and appreciation for the environment:

• Take students outside to observe the music created by nature. Spend some quiet time just observing the sounds. How would students use their musical vocabulary to describe the dynamics of the wind, the melody of a bird’s chirp, or the buzz of a bee? How do these sounds work together (in harmony)? Why do we need the contributions of these elements, sounds, and creatures?
• Ask students to compare musical characteristics with certain traits of the outdoors. Do sunny days represent happy, major keys, and do cloudy days represent sad, minor keys? Encourage out-of-the-box thinking, and have fun with it—what does the grass sound like? The changing colors of the leaves? How about a squirrel climbing a tree? There are no right or wrong answers!
• Completely unplug from the classroom and conduct an outdoor sing-a-long or rehearsal. This is an opportunity to not only conserve energy, but also to switch things up, keep students engaged, enjoy the outdoors, and hear the music they’ve been learning with refreshed ears in a new setting.
• Assign songs and repertoire that explore themes of the outdoors, nature, and the earth. Establish personal connections to the music and themes by discussing the text or compositional choices in an outdoor space. You may want to go the extra mile and prepare an outdoor concert for parents and the community, or even a fundraiser.
• Utilize recycled materials to construct music instruments! Turn boxes and rubber bands into guitars, and water bottles full of beads into shakers. Decorate the instruments using nature as inspiration.

For additional inspiration and ideas, consider these songbooks and performance pieces related to the environment, going green, and saving the planet:

• It’s Easy Being Green - A songbook or program teaching ways to save our planet, for unison voices.
• The Green Songbook - Includes 43 songs that tie into aspects of eco-sustainability, arranged for beginning guitar.
• Planet Earth - Captivating piano solos accompanied by beautiful photographs that encourage students to help preserve the natural wonders of our planet.
• Power the Earth - A concert band arrangement by Robert Sheldon that represents some of the prominent forms of renewable energy produced in the Imperial Valley.
• S.O.S. Songs of the Sea - Students will enjoy learning about the sea and its creatures through engaging songs and reproducible activities.

2. For Late Elementary/Middle School Students

Plant a class garden, feed it with music, measure the results.

Fun fact: if you Google ‘music and plants,’ you’ll get about 429 million results on how music affects plant growth.

If you read any given article on the subject, you’ll learn that music specifically can’t take all the credit—it’s actually the vibration of sound waves that stimulate plant growth. But what noise could possibly create more beautiful sound waves than music?!

Further, according to an article from Smiling Gardener , the type of sound could make a big difference (in other words, genre). Spoiler alert: don’t blast aggressive rock music at your plants, please.

Here’s an idea for a hands-on music and science project, and a fun opportunity to collaborate with your science department colleagues.

1. Set aside a section of a classroom near a window or outdoor space for planting seeds in individual pots.
2. Instruct students on filling each pot with equal amounts of soil and equal amounts of seeds.
3. Label two groups of pots accordingly—those that will receive music attention each day, and those that won’t.
4. Pots and plants should receive the same amount of sunlight each day, and the same amount of water (as needed).
5. Conduct rehearsals or play music (daily) near the pots labeled for receiving music, while keeping the second group of pots separate and away from the sound.
6. Measure and record the height of each plant every day, and compare the results over time among the two groups to determine the effect of music on plant growth.

Take advantage of every opportunity to overlap this project with science and math curriculum. Incorporate the steps of the scientific process through posing a question, conducting research, creating hypotheses, testing theories, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. Students can also plot a graph of the results over time on an axis to compare the rate of growth of each group of plants. Calculate the average rate of growth, and compare the differences between the two groups.

3. For High School/College Students

Study or create compositions that translate climate data into music.

What if there were a way to create music based on climate change data? What if science-guided music could reflect and communicate the story of earth’s climate, over time?

Believe it or not, this stuff exists!

The ClimateMusic Project is a non-profit organization that seeks to simplify the comprehension of climate change by creating original, engaging music and pairing it with a visual experience that inspires and motivates audiences to take action. These combined efforts of scientists and artists help answer the question, "What does climate change sound like?"

Additionally, what if line graphs and charts that present scientific data could be transcribed into music notation to assist with climate literacy? How can pitch and rhythm help us better connect with planetary change?

In her TEDxSeattle presentation , researcher Judy Twedt describes how she hacked climate data to output sounds instead of charts. Using the Keeling Curve as inspiration—a graph that records the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide over time—Twedt turned those rising numbers into rising pitches of a composition. "Listening to data unfold one note after another can help us to understand how we're changing the planet over time."

Watch the stirring video to learn more about her story and process, and listen to one example that delivers 36 years of sea ice data via a 3-minute piano composition. Consider assigning students projects that involve researching similar pieces of climate data and translating the information into their own original musical compositions.

Conclusion

We can do for all music students what that Barney song did for me as a kid. Through music, we can instill awareness and appreciation for the environment, promote personal responsibility, and effectively communicate the importance of taking care of the planet. We can exploit educational opportunities to collaborate with other departments and create real, hands-on, personal learning experiences that students will remember for the rest of their lives. Let’s keep the “world” in our combined effort to help the world experience the joy of making music.