Oysters Ain’t Safe: Jazzing Up the Environmental Crisis

If you’ve ever stared at an Excel spreadsheet full of grim environmental data and thought, “This really needs a saxophone solo,” then you’ll adore what a group of Florida researchers have cooked up. Picture this: the decline of oyster populations—yes, those briny little molluscs you slurp with lemon—translated into a smooth jazz number called Oysters Ain’t Safe. Suddenly, the slow death of an ecosystem doesn’t just look tragic in charts; it sounds like late‑night blues in a smoke‑free bar.

The ringleader of this peculiar symphony is Professor Heather O’Leary from the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. She’s an anthropologist with a flair for remixing science into art. O’Leary didn’t want to be just another academic muttering about habitat degradation into the void. She wanted people to feel the story of the oysters, not just read a report on it and then ignore it in favour of football highlights. So she did the unthinkable: she handed over ecological data to musicians and asked them to compose.

What came back was Oysters Ain’t Safe, a piece of jazz that makes climate change feel less like an abstract menace and more like a moody evening jam session. Every note, every shift in rhythm, carries the weight of Florida’s oyster population charts. When the numbers dip, the sound dips. When human greed spikes, the trumpet blares. You’re no longer dealing with anonymous percentages but with music that sighs and scats its way through ecological heartbreak.

This isn’t O’Leary’s first rodeo in the world of data‑turned‑music. Last year, her students helped shape pieces about coral disease and red tide, with charmingly earnest titles like Sanctuary and Cardinal Flow. Those were performed by the USF Symphonic Band, which already suggests a certain level of seriousness. But this time, things shifted into jazz—looser, slipperier, more likely to make you tap your foot while simultaneously pondering the futility of human behaviour.

The inspiration sits under the rather over‑engineered acronym CRESCENDO, which in proper academic style stands for Communicating Research Expansively through Sonification and Community‑Engaged Neuroaesthetic Data‑literacy Opportunities. That mouthful proves two things: academics love capital letters and academics will do anything to avoid calling something simply “Music Project.” Still, CRESCENDO captures the idea—science, art, and community stitched together with an occasional drum fill.

To build Oysters Ain’t Safe, O’Leary and her team worked with decades of oyster population data from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and combined it with local survey responses. Imagine the blend: raw science numbers plus public mood swings, baked into a sheet of music. The composition reflects not just what’s happening to oysters but how people feel about it. The pillars of people, planet, profit make an appearance, woven through the score like thematic threads. You get a jazz piece that doesn’t just speak of disappearing reefs but also hints at economic greed and cultural short‑sightedness.

The real fun lies in the idea of spreadsheets becoming soundscapes. It’s one thing to tell the public that oyster populations are down by seventy percent. It’s another to make them sit in a theatre while a saxophonist moans that seventy percent drop in minor chords. Data doesn’t often make people cry; music does. By pairing the two, O’Leary is pulling a trick worthy of a magician: turning statistics into something you can hum.

Let’s be honest, oysters have never had a great public relations strategy. They’re messy to eat, they look like lumps of grey mush, and they require an alarming amount of lemon juice to be remotely palatable. Yet they play a crucial role in ecosystems, filtering water, providing habitat, stabilising shorelines. Their steady disappearance in Florida waters is not just an inconvenience for seafood restaurants; it’s a flashing neon sign that the coastal environment is faltering. And if you can’t get people to care about neon signs, maybe a trumpet solo will do the trick.

The piece itself is a soft jazz number, smooth and slightly sad, with improvisational passages that echo the unpredictability of environmental crises. Red tide blooms sneak in like discordant notes. PFAS, those “forever chemicals,” take shape in uneasy rhythms. Overharvesting turns into a restless beat that pushes the song forward in a way that feels almost frantic. It’s the sort of thing you could imagine playing in a smoky lounge, except instead of martinis, the clientele sip sustainably sourced oyster shooters while nodding gravely at the fate of marine ecosystems.

Students played a central role. Marine science postgrads worked with music students under the guidance of Matt McCutchen, a professor of music at USF. They weren’t just dabbling; they were trying to translate the collapse of an ecosystem into notes on a page. One minute they’re knee‑deep in population surveys, the next they’re arranging a score. It’s a kind of collaboration that makes you wonder why more scientific fields don’t get their own soundtrack. Imagine epidemiology in the form of techno, or macroeconomics as a country ballad. The possibilities are endless and mildly terrifying.

O’Leary herself describes this as “radical optimism.” She’s not denying the grimness of the data, but she refuses to package it as despair. Instead, she invites people to play with it—literally. Her mantra seems to be: if people won’t engage with science, give them music. Let them dance around the data, maybe even whistle it on their way home. After all, the apocalypse always feels more bearable with a decent rhythm section.

There’s something gently subversive about this approach. Most scientists present their findings in PowerPoint slides that induce yawning fits and existential dread. O’Leary presents hers in a concert hall, with bass clarinets and vibraphones. It’s part scientific outreach, part performance art, and part environmental protest. You could argue it’s performative in every sense of the word. But if the choice is between falling asleep in a lecture or tapping your foot while absorbing climate data, the latter feels like an obvious improvement.

The broader project has already earned accolades, including the Kate Browne Creativity in Research Award from the Society for Economic Anthropology. That’s not a household name in prizes, but in the dusty corridors of academia, it’s a nod of approval that says: yes, this is the sort of bizarre creativity we secretly admire but rarely dare to attempt.

And there’s more on the horizon. Oysters Ain’t Safe will have its live premiere in January 2026 at USF, complete with sheet music, student artwork, a music video, and even an augmented reality component. Because why stop at saxophones when you can add AR oysters floating around the auditorium? You may sit down for jazz but leave dodging holographic molluscs. If this doesn’t make people talk about environmental decline, nothing will.

What makes the whole idea compelling is its refusal to fit into a neat box. It’s not propaganda, though it carries a message. It’s not pure art, though it stands alone musically. It’s not pure science, though it’s based on hard data. It’s a messy hybrid, much like the estuaries it’s trying to protect. The music slips between genres, the science slips between charts and chords, and the audience slips between toe‑tapping enjoyment and uncomfortable awareness.

In a way, Oysters Ain’t Safe mirrors the oysters themselves. They filter, they blend, they hold ecosystems together quietly, without glory. You never notice them until they’re gone. Likewise, you might not notice the environmental crisis until someone points it out in a way you can’t ignore. Like, for example, by having a trumpet sob through the statistics of decline.

The project also raises a cheeky question: why not reimagine other crises as musical genres? Deforestation could be heavy metal, with chainsaw guitar riffs. Rising carbon emissions could be a trance track, endlessly looping. Urban air pollution might work well as industrial techno, complete with coughing samples. The possibilities for data sonification stretch far beyond oysters, though molluscs make an oddly fitting muse.

Back in Florida, though, the stakes remain serious. Oysters are vanishing, shorelines are destabilising, and chemical pollutants are everywhere. The music doesn’t solve that. But it gives people a way to connect emotionally, to understand on a visceral level what’s being lost. That’s not nothing. In fact, it might be the crucial first step toward genuine change. If people feel it, maybe they’ll act. Maybe not. But at least they’ll hum along while thinking about it.

So the next time you see grim environmental data, don’t roll your eyes. Imagine it set to music. Picture glaciers melting in the form of a mournful cello. Picture droughts rendered as stark minimalist piano. Picture oyster decline as jazz—because someone in Florida has already done exactly that. And whether or not oysters make a comeback, at least we’ll have a soundtrack for the mess we’ve made.