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

A professor teamed up with student musicians to inspire interest in data about the ‘catastrophic scale’ of the crisis

A university professor has set her team’s research on the plight of Florida’s declining oyster population to music, aiming to inform a receptive new audience about the “catastrophic” scale of the crisis.

Heather O’Leary, professor of anthropology at St Petersburg’s University of South Florida (USF), partnered with student composers and faculty from its music department to create Oysters Ain’t Safe, a soft jazz alternative to crunching data into a “boring” technical report.