Lucy Jones, California’s beloved earthquake expert, sits down with environment reporter Rosanna Xia to discuss her new project: using music to inspire people to take action against climate change.
Lucy Jones, California’s beloved earthquake expert, sits down with environment reporter Rosanna Xia to discuss her new project: using music to inspire people to take action against climate change. Listen to hear Lucy go through her process, her collaborators explain the psychology behind it all, and — of course — a sampling of the compositions. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Rosanna Xia
Guests: Lucy Jones
More reading:
Column One: Can music inspire more people to care about climate change?
Lucy Jones is leaving her job - to shake up more than just earthquakes
Gustavo: Hey, what’s up? It’s Gustavo Arellano, and today we’re doing something special. This episode is our first-ever Column One done as an audio story. For those of you who don’t know, Column One is a legendary series at the Los Angeles Times that goes back decades where our writers get creative with their storytelling and do deep dives into unexpected topics.
And so I’m now going to pass the mic over to environmental reporter Rosanna Xia. You best know her as one of our Masters of Disasters, but Rosanna is an amazing reporter and writer, just incredible. Today she’s going to be speaking with a very, very, very special guest — renowned seismologist Lucy Jones. Southern Californians know her as the voice of all reason whenever an earthquake hits, but did you know she’s also a classical music extraordinaire?
Rosanna and Lucy are about to take you on a journey that’s a little bit musical, a little bit psychology, and a whole lot of scary. Just kidding! At the heart of today’s episode is an unusually fascinating question that Lucy has been trying to answer for years: Can music change the way we think about climate change?
Rosanna, take it away!
Rosanna Xia: I’m Rosanna Xia, you’re listening to “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” It’s Friday, March 31, 2023.
I first met Lucy Jones years ago when she was Southern California's favorite, most famous, seismologist.
News waterfall: [Alarm sounds] And now we're having an aftershock … renowned seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones …. Dr. Lucy Jones, the earthquake lady … quake expert Dr. Lucy Jones is out with a new … For almost 30 years, Lucy Jones has been a rock star of sorts.
Rosanna: Someone once called her the Beyonce of earthquakes, but there's a different side to her that might be even more maestro than Beyonce.
Greeting: Hello? Oh, my God, so good to see you, it’s been … it’s forever …
Rosanna: Lucy, it turns out, is also a talented musician — classical music, to be exact. And she's quite skilled at a cello-like instrument known as the viola da gamba.
Lucy Jones: I was gonna tune these guys too, because they don't, and there's also certain.
Rosanna: She practices her scales every day, performs on the weekend. But something else has been weighing on her mind this whole time: climate change. Similar to earthquakes, climate change is also a massive disaster that's not a matter of if, but when. Actually it's a matter of now.
AP: Humanity is on thin ice and that ice is melting fast …. California's atmospheric river left the storm-soaked state with a bang, bringing flooded roadways, landslides, and toppled trees to the southern part of the state …. Humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years …. The cascading risks are also clear, becoming almost unimaginable.
Rosanna: So Lucy started thinking about whether she could use her love for music to make a difference in climate change. And that's how the Tempo Project was born
Lucy, welcome to the podcast. I can't believe we are here together with your viola da gamba. I have so many questions, and I'm so excited for our conversation today.
Lucy: I'm glad to have you here. This is a change from the old earthquake days, isn't it?
Rosanna: So, Lucy, I mean, catch us up. How did you go from earthquakes to climate change?
Lucy: My earthquakes migrated into disasters. I ended up leading a project to look at how all sorts of different disasters will be affecting California and it quickly came to realize that what's coming with climate change is so large that it dwarfs what the earthquakes will do to us. And I cannot justify really pushing seismic safety issues if we aren't gonna deal with climate change.
Rosanna: And I've also kind of made that transition from covering earthquakes, you know, when we first met, to, you know, environmental reporting, and I've personally really struggled to communicate the urgency in which we need to act to prepare to really rethink our ways of life. I, I mean, so Lucy, what, what got you thinking that maybe like, hey, maybe music could be a way to get more people to care, to think about this differently?
Lucy: It's partly because of how scientists look at what's going on with climate change. We can look at the data, fit algorithms, recognize that it's an exponential growth curve, and go, oh, my God, I'm terrified.
Rosanna: Yep.
Lucy Jones: Whereas nobody can process what an exponential growth curve means, right? And you hear people talking about the new norma,l because we now have all these wildfires.
Rosanna: Mm-hmm.
Lucy: This isn't normal. So all of that, I, I started to realize that as a scientist, I look at data and I develop an emotional reaction that compels me to act. And the psychologists say you never act just because of analysis; you need your feelings involved to do it. So as a scientist, we tend to think, hey, let's just give you more data and you'll get there. And of course it's not working. And if you say you have to have feelings to act, I turn to music, because music's where I've always been able to process and release my emotions that I can never do on the analytical side.
Rosanna: Yeah, and I, I feel like as scientists, if you think, like if you are having emotional reactions to data and you think other people are having emotional reactions, then you think the solution is more scary data, but there's something missing, right?
Lucy Jones: Right. Well, there's two things. One of it is that, just being scared is not what we need, right? We need to have emotions that compel us to act. And fear often compels us to ignore it. If you're really scared and you don't have a solution, the only way to not be scared is to not think about it, right? Um, and but also, we just, you know, how do you go from data to feeling? And, and music does do that for me. It does it for a lot of people.
Rosanna: So how do we go from data to feeling? More on that after the break.
OK, so Lucy, before the break, we were talking about turning climate change data into music that people could actually feel. How do you even begin to do that?
Lucy: Ah, I have started a quite different activity. I call it Tempo Music for Climate Action, and we are bringing together the climate scientists who know what we need to do to save the world with the social scientists, the people who study risk perception, who understand the emotions that are keeping us from acting. And then with those two groups of scientists, we include the musicians, who know how to evoke emotions.
And I got the idea from hearing someone else, a cellist, who had taken the global climate data, the average temperature of the world every year, and turned it into pitch. How do you turn that into music? B flat, D flat, C … Those, that's the temperature data, all right? So that if you have a certain temperature, the beginning, uh, temperature in 1880, we just assigned it to B flat.
And then if it gets colder than that, like the early 1910 area, it's down here. It's gotten colder because of a volcanic eruption, right? It goes up and down. And one of the things about doing it this way, we can see that an annual variation year — we have a really cold year this year; we might have a really warm year next year — is about a sixth. So from a B flat to a G, that would be the biggest jump you ever see, year to year. But they then tend to stay around the same place, until recently. And I don't get onto the top string of this instrument until almost 1990 they actually need to be up on the next string, the top string. And then it just keeps on going up. And by 1998, we’re already an octave above the top string. And then that was, that 1998 was a really, it was one of those jump years. And then it comes back and it alternate around and sits up here above the frets where it's hard to stay in. And then it keeps on going up. And by 2016, I literally go off the end of the fingerboard. And then it steps back … and if I were still doing it, now we've been sitting up here at this high A for the last few years. Right now we're on this. Remember that, I mean, if I look back and think about the 1950s when I was born … and now we can't seem to get below right about here … and it's still gonna be going up. I, I can't, I'll have to do a whole new scaling function.
Rosanna: You've got no space on your gamba to literally move up.
Lucy: I literally ran off the end of the fingerboard.
Rosanna: It's really cool to think about how you assigned temperature data to pitch and, you know, something that I think a lot about in just communicating on climate change and as an environmental writer is just this idea of how our baselines for normal shifts.
Lucy: The classic geology problem. We think in human time scales and the earth operates in different time scales, and to me it's terrifying that climate can be moving on human time scales. I shouldn't be able to hear the difference in the span of my life. Nothing geologically should be going on like that. And you know, I hear people talk about, well, the climate's always changed. It's never changed at this rate. It's never changed at a rate that a human being could experience it.
Rosanna: Could you maybe walk us through the first piece you composed as part of this idea to get people thinking differently about climate change?
Lucy Jones: So I created this piece called “In Nomine Terra Calens,” uh, which is, could be translated as in the name of a warming Earth. Early on I'm focusing on sharing a motif, which is something that's done in this type of music where we all play the same, uh, little phrase and we share it back and forth.
A little bit slower, a little bit faster … and as I go into the end, I started bringing the motifs on top of each other, made them clash with each other. And you didn't finish one before you got to the next ’cause I wanted to give it a feeling of stress and urgency. And one thing, when you put the motifs on top of each other, it's become somewhat more discordant ’cause there's only so many notes to share around. And so it got harsher and faster and more frantic, and then at the very end I start dropping it off because I don't know where it’s going.
We’re still making choices, and we could be going on if we do nothing, our choice to do nothing, means we're going to get to catastrophic disruption of this world that I think will lead to world war. Because when you have a billion people that will have to choose between moving and dying, it's one thing to say 2 degrees C, that doesn't mean anything to you. Say we've reached the point that a billion people can no longer live where they've always lived, and think what that does to the world, and we don't have to get to 2 degrees C to get to that. That's gonna happen before then.
Rosanna: So I, I'm also like curious about you're a process, you know, who have you talked to to help figure out how to meld the science and the data with the music and the right kind of messaging, because like the, the metaness of it is really impressive.
Lucy Jones: So I wrote this music by myself, but I also came to realize that what I was doing — data awareness — is not enough to lead to action. You know, I've ended up getting to know people like Paul Slovic and Sarah Dryhurst, who are psychologists who study how we think about dangerous things.
Sarah Dryhurst: My name is Dr. Sarah Dryhurst and I am a senior research fellow at the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London. We, psychologists and neuroscientists kind of conceive of as having these two modes of thinking: this Type 1, experiential, fast-thinking, it's responsive to stories, it gives us, uh, quick emotions about things. So that aspect of our thinking is mostly subconscious. And what that means is it’s about the emotions and the experiences people have with a particular risk that can guide their perceptions of that risk.
Lucy: The big insight I got was that understanding a risk, the analysis of a risk is insufficient to lead to action. You have to have the feeling of being in danger to motivate you to move to action. And, that the feeling of fear or awareness that you get from the music I wrote isn't necessarily gonna create the right action.
Sarah: One of the issues with fear is too much fear can lead us to this feeling of, well, well we, sometimes we can become fatalistic. We can feel that we can't make a difference,
Lucy: If you are overwhelmed by how bad it is, your grief at what we're doing, despair of how can I make a difference, you're not gonna act. So we can't just say, feel the data. We have to say, create the right emotions so that you lead to action. If you want to make a difference, don't just get people scared about climate change. Get them to care in a different way.
Sarah: Fear isn't enough in and of itself. We need to also feel a sense that we can actually do something about the problem that we are fearful of. And I think that is where this other key emotion of hope comes in, which is this feeling that we can individually but even more so collectively make a difference
Lucy: By bringing together Sarah and Paul and the musicians and the scientists, we've been able to synthesize this into a, the understanding that we need to believe that it's happening. But more than that, we need to believe that our actions make a difference. And we have to feel like it's possible to be done.
Rosanna: After the break. More on that and how music from the civil rights movement inspired the Tempo Project.
Lucy, you recently rallied an entire choir to perform another piece that had been composed as part of the Tempo Project, you know, with lyrics and everything. It premiered before thousands of scientists at the annual conference held by the American Geophysical Union, also known as AGU. How did that all come together?
Lucy: This is the Tempo Project, right? And, we got the opportunity, we got funded to start it, and I started reaching out to people that I thought were wonderful, you know. And, uh, Jonathan Beard is a Emmy award-winning composer here in, in Los Angeles. And Shawn Kirchner is a choral composer; I’ve sung his stuff and seen him with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. So Shawn's been part of the process all the way along and has really added depth through his understanding of, of music and the civil rights movement.
And I'm old enough to remember the civil rights movement and all that happened there. That was really fundamental to the inspiration to get going, and Shawn really helped me understand that in more detail too,
Shawn Kirchner: As a musician, I connected so strongly with Bernie Johnson Reagan, who was one of the original freedom singers who went on to found Sweet Honey in the Rock.,
Bernie Johnson Regan singing: Over my head, I see freedom in the air. Over my head….
Shawn: In the segregated South, there were places that she couldn't go. But her sound, which emanates out from her body, could actually get into the space before she could. And in a way that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to have our songs carve out this space in our imagination that yes, we can become these kinds of people that produced this kind of world. But for me it was so fertile to apply it, one-to-one correspondence with this movement
Bernice Johnson Regan: … somewhere
Lucy: He's taken the whole tempo, philosophies, everything that we've been talking about with these psychologists and put it into his music. And it's the right, hopeful message. It's, it's the message that the scientists give, which is there are solutions. They're not easy solutions, but there are solutions and we've got to be willing to do them. Shawn turned that into music and it's called “Courage to Care.”
Choir: When the stats are grim, it takes courage to care. When the odds are slim, it takes courage to care,
Shawn Kirchner: So one of the things that I was kind of happy about eventually seizing upon, you always have to figure out a way to start a song. So when I came up with the idea of: When the stats are grim, it takes courage to care and the odds are slim ….
Choir: … and when the odds are slim, it takes courage to care. Courage to care.
Shawn/choir: It was fun for me also to kind of write some verses about what are specific things we can do. So there's a little section where like every ride we’re sharing [we’re sharing, courage to care], every trip we’re sparing [trip we’re sparing, courage to care], every tree left standing, every change demanding. We really have to believe that the little things we do make a difference. And I live here in L.A. You know how many millions of people live here? If all of us do one small thing it's multiplied by 18 million or 19 million, that's huge.
Choir: If we want to break the fever, if we want to break the fever. Turn the doubter to believer, turn the doubter to believer…
Shawn: Many of the freedom songs are call response. And that's, that's how humans learn. Our parents or our schoolteachers say a phrase or sing a phrase and we echo it back. We're built to echo back. And so when I was writing the song, I really thought, OK, well I have a little bit of a challenge ’cause I want to get these scientists. I don't know if these people are musicians. I want to get these scientists to sing this song with me.
MISSING CHOIR VERSE
Shawn: And almost the entire song can be echoed back. Either portions of phrases or whole phrases, and it was completely structured to be that way.
MISSING CHOIR VERSE
Lucy: And one of the most important things that a composer needs to do — and Shawn is really good at this — is have the musical emotion match the lyrical emotion.
Choir: Courage to care
Lucy: We have to be very morally careful in Tempo, because we're talking about using these subliminal emotional responses that music evokes to change people's opinions. Sometimes that's called propaganda, right? Uh, think about how military music was used in Germany in the 20th century. Music is very powerful and you can use it in different ways, and so what we're trying to do, we just need to be explicit about the fact that we are taking on this issue. We are trying to convey a message, and we are trying to make the emotional framework for that message be supportive. So I feel morally correct in what I'm trying to help people understand. And my future ideal of Tempo is we get more music like “Courage to Care,” where people will feel good at singing it together at a demonstration.
In early discussions with Shawn, he finally looked at me and went: So your goal is to get the climate anthem that everyone will sing and you don't care who actually writes it. Yeah. That's a pretty good description. I want to inspire enough musicians that somewhere in there we find the climate anthem, or maybe we find a thousand climate anthems that work with different groups. Either way would work for me.
Rosanna: The thought of having a climate anthem, or anthems, is really compelling. I mean, Lucy, like how, how do we actually do that?
Lucy: I want this to be more than Americans pontificating to the rest of the world, and climate change is a global problem. It has to have a global solution. We actually were able to get funding from the U.S.-Japan Foundation. I think when they first approached me, they thought I'd do something about earthquakes. I wasn't willing to commit to work unless it was something I really wanted to do. So we are doing this project biculturally, where we are engaging both scientists and musicians from both countries. From the beginning, much of the interaction with Japan has been facilitated by Makiko Harada.
Makiko Harada: So the way we process sound is much closer to our survival instincts and emotions, and it's also much quicker, much intuitive in our brains.
Lucy: She's an amazing concert pianist that the U.S.-Japan Foundation introduced me to who has become absolutely passionate about Tempo and is not only a brilliant pianist, but she's also been doing a lot of research with neurologists and neuroscientists about how we physically react to music.
Rosanna: Yeah, isn't her nickname like “Dr. Pianist”?
Lucy: Yes. One of the things that Makiko helped me see was more explicitly the limitation of my music in that it's data sonification, which accesses a different part of your brain. We process auditory data 20 to a hundred times faster than visual data.
Makiko: For example, you know, alarm clocks or, right, alarm for like fire or earthquake or whatever, right? That works much better than visual input. It just triggers us to move, even without thinking,
Rising Tide song: Revolution, unifying the hope. In our hope we come together rising tide,
Lucy: And a lot of what happens in music happens way below the level of language. Yes, we want to add lyrics. But the music is making our heartbeats align. When you sing together, obviously you breathe together, but you actually start lining up your heartbeats and everything else about the rhythms within your body, and that makes a connection.
Rising Tide song: Mother revolution. Mother revolution. When we come together. When we come together.
Makiko Harada: So I think really what would help us is to reframe climate change as a symptom to a more, like a bigger underlying problem of apathy and disconnect. And I think music really sort of reminds us that this individualism is what has led us here.
But, you know, um, in COVID there was this thought that we are one body and if one body is hurt, everybody's hurt. I think if we can think of humanity as one big organism, then I think we'd have a much better chance of mitigating the damage from climate change. And I think music can do that.
Rising Tide song: Manifest creation.
Rosanna: Lucy I’ll admit, you've left me feeling kind of hopeful and excited, you know, which are not things I say too often when it comes to climate change.
Lucy: Good, but I think that that's the core of what my message has been, both for earthquakes and for climate change. The hazards the world has is inevitable. The disaster is not how we experience earthquakes, how we experience climate change, how we experience the floods that are coming. All of those reflect our choices and we have to believe enough to make that difference. Yeah, scientists are inherently optimistic. We inherently have hope, we look for solutions. We just struggle at how to express it and communicate it to others. And here we're asking the musicians to help us get that message that the solution is possible out there.
Rising Tide song: Mother revolution. Mother revolution. When we come together
Rosanna: OK, so that feels like the right note to end on.
Thank you, Lucy, for sharing your music and your science and your community with us today.
Lucy:Thank you for having me and for sharing this message, because we have to act together. We need the community to grow, because this is how we're going to change the world.
Rosanna: What you just heard was “Rising Tide” composed by Jonathan Beard, with lyrics by Minita Gandhi. You also heard “Courage to Care,” composed by Shawn Kirchner. Both pieces were performed by the Eco Voice Project's New Earth Ensemble. We also had the honor of playing “Freedom in the Air” by Bernice Johnson Reagon. And course, the piece composed by Lucy Jones herself, "In Nomine Terra Calens: In the name of a warming Earth," recorded by Josh Lee and Ostraka.
Rosanna: And that's it for this episode of “The Times Essential News from the L.A. Times.” Our amazing producers for this episode were Ashley Brown and Denise Guerra. Big thank you also to Heba Elorbany for her editing and Mark Nieto for mixing and mastering. The show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasha Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our fellow is Helen Li. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. and our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
Gustavo Arellano is the host and he will be back Monday with more news and great storytelling.