Waking Up to No Sound: Music Psychology and Climate Action

Lindsay A. Fleming and Daniel J. Levitin, McGill University

Banner photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior.

Dr. Francis Collins (PBS, 2021)

INTRODUCTION

More than 20 years ago, Stuart Oskamp (2000) posed the question How can psychology help create a sustainable future for humanity? Music psychologists have yet to respond. While it may seem naïve to assert that music can solve the climate crisis, it is irresponsible to assume it has no role (Prior, 2022; Publicover et al., 2019). Music is a cultural universal and for centuries has been used to bind people together, change their minds, and promote participation in group enterprises for social change (Levitin, 2008). Incorporating music psychology principles into climate action campaigns, educational programs, and community engagement initiatives can tap into the emotional, cognitive, and social aspects of human behavior, fostering a deeper connection to environmental concerns and inspiring positive changes for a more sustainable future.

Climate change represents the most serious threat to survival in all human history. It is already responsible for more heat waves, extreme weather, the spread of disease, increasing pollution, and reduced productivity (IPCC, 2022). In addition to direct effects like storms, floods, and fires, we are facing indirect effects including decreased crop yields, overwhelmed water systems, hospital shutdowns, loss of homes, and increased mental health problems. Climate scientists unanimously and unequivocally agree: the increase of CO₂, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere over the industrial era is the result of human activities. We cannot afford to underinvest in research on human behavior.

The field of environmental psychology has emerged to study human behavior in relation to climate change. Environmental and climate psychologists research ways to change destructive behaviors and embrace beneficial ones, such as recycling, using public transportation, and enhancing energy efficiency. Their research explores people’s attitudes toward environmental issues, the factors that determine those attitudes, and how those attitudes affect behavior. Other behavioral scientists, including music psychologists could, and arguably should, help to identify drivers of awareness, concern, and action; sustainability professionals can, in turn, leverage this knowledge to deliver evidenced-based climate programs.

THE POWER OF MUSIC

Musicians, music psychologists, and music therapists recognize the power of music to influence our emotions, moods, thoughts, wellbeing, identity, and behavior. Music moves us emotionally (Juslin, 2019; Juslin & Sloboda, 2010) through listening and performing (Gabrielsson, 2011; Lamont, 2012). We use it for mood regulation (Baltazar & Saarikallio, 2016; Saarikallio & Erkkilä, 2007), social bonding (Savage et al., 2021), and to enhance our experiences of tasks (Clarke et al., 2010) and wellbeing (Levitin, 2019) in everyday life. Music influences both the content and valence of our thoughts (Koelsch et al., 2019) and forms a crucial part of our individual and collective identities (Hargreaves et al., 2017).

When we perceive the emotional and psychological content of music, we interpret the thoughts and feelings of others—encouraging altruism, compassion, empathy, and pro-social decisions (Clarke et al., 2015; Fukui & Toyoshima, 2014; McDonald et al., 2022; Wu & Lu, 2021). When Kirschner and Tomasello (2010) examined the relationship between collaborative music making and helping behaviors in 4-year-olds, they found children who made music with their peers were more helpful than those who only chatted with others. Similarly, experiments in our lab showed that playing music together increases empathy in young adults. Based on the well-established phenomenon that people who feel empathy for one another dislike seeing one another in pain, we set up a cold pressor test—one participant held their hand in a bucket of ice water (0 – 4 degrees Celsius) for as long as they could while a second participant watched. When the participant was a close friend—someone they’d known for five years or more—the onlookers’ ratings of distress, discomfort, and empathy were higher than when they were a stranger. But asking strangers to play the musical video game Rock Band together in cooperative mode for 20 minutes before the cold pressor task brought on levels of empathy equivalent to being friends for five years (Martin et al., 2015).

HOW CAN MUSICIANS CREATE A MORE SUSTAINABLE FUTURE?

Music is often used to impart urgent and important messages about the environment. The United Nations Environment Programme (2016) calls music “one of the most powerful media to communicate environmental messages to billions of people worldwide – irrespective of race, religion, income, gender, or age.” Organizations such as Artists and Climate Change, Climate Music, and the David Suzuki Foundation encourage musicians to create pro-environmental works. In early 2020, the New York Times analyzed lyrics from all artists who had appeared on any of Billboard’s domestic charts between 1999 and 2019. Kendra Pierre-Louis (2020) reports a total of 192 unique references to climate change. Two-thirds of those came between 2009 and 2019—the hottest decade on record at that point.

Many professional musicians also reduce their own impacts on the environment by avoiding plastic packaging, powering events with green energy and reducing air travel, as Jennifer Publicover and her colleagues at Dalhousie University observe (2019). REVERB (2023), a non-profit that advocates for sustainability within the music industry, reports that it has helped reduce the environmental impacts of over 330 major tours and 6,800 concert events. REVERB works with artists like Billie Eilish, Jack Johnson, P!NK, Maroon 5, Dave Matthews Band, Harry Styles, and Fleetwood Mac to fight carbon pollution, educate fans about the climate crisis, and put an end to related harmful practices.

Coldplay exemplifies the extent to which artists can go to achieve such ends. According to the band’s website (2023), their 2022 “Music Of The Spheres” tour reduced CO₂ emissions by 47% compared to their 2016-17 stadium tour. In 2023, they further reduced emissions by running the entire show from an electric battery system (charged by fans on power bikes and kinetic dance floors), using electric vehicles and alternative fuels, and limiting waste and plastic use. Fans are encouraged to travel to shows by foot, bicycle, public transport, and ride-shares. On site, they are encouraged to use recycling bins, bring refillable water bottles, and return wristbands for reuse. Additionally, for every ticket sold, the band planted a tree and made contributions to a range of environmental organisations like The Ocean Cleanup and ClientEarth.

HOW CAN MUSIC PSYCHOLOGISTS HELP?

Music psychologists have not yet studied the influence of such actions on the part of musicians or pro-environmental musical messages; nor have we examined the mechanisms through which music might help us to address the climate crisis. However, Dekoninck and Schmuck (2022; 2023) demonstrate that followers of eco-conscious social media influencers show higher pro-environmental behavior intentions over time and participate more in political sphere-oriented and cause-oriented actions. The same may hold true for fans and followers of eco-conscious musicians, and music psychologists can provide further insight into human behaviors related to climate issues by exploring how music influences emotions, cognition, and behavior. We should examine the effects of music itself, as well as musical experience, engagement, and training, on a range of outcomes including our (a) awareness of the climate crisis, (b) concern for the environment, (c) pro-environmental behaviors, (d) climate anxiety, and (e) climate action self-efficacy (i.e., belief that our actions can make a difference). This research would contribute to our wellbeing and enhance educational programs by providing a better understanding of the role of music in the fight against climate change.

MUSIC AND CLIMATE ANXIETY

Much psychology research focuses on the mental health outcomes following an acute climate change hazard such as a flood, earthquake, wildfire, or hurricane. The mental health impacts of climate change can be direct, indirect, or vicarious (Akresh, 2016; Berry et al., 2010; Cianconi et al., 2020; Clayton et al., 2017; Hayes et al., 2018; Usher et al., 2019). Direct impacts include post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal thoughts. Slow-onset impacts of climate change (e.g., consequences on the economy, migration, drought, melting permafrost, and sea-level rise) indirectly affect stress, grief, anxiety, and depression. Even people who witness the effects of climate change vicariously through the media can experience negative mental health effects like panic attacks, insomnia, or obsessive thinking.

There is much less research on these vicarious effects of climate change, but scholars agree that knowing about climate change and its consequences can trigger guilt, sadness, anger, and “psychoterratic syndromes”—a term coined by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht (2011; 2012) to denote mental conditions arising from our relationship with the natural world. Writing for the APA, Susan Clayton and her colleagues (2017) recognize eco-anxiety as a “chronic fear of environmental doom.” Susan Koger’s team at Willamette University (2011) describes eco-paralysis as feeling unable to mitigate or stop climate change. Solastalgia, another term coined by Albrecht (2007; 2011; 2012), denotes feelings of homesickness and distress in witnessing ecological changes to one’s home. Cunsolo and Ellis (2018) define ecological grief as the mourning of ecological loss or anticipated losses of land, species, culture, sense of place, cultural identity, and ways of knowing. Psychoterratic syndromes are not mental health diagnoses and are not considered pathological problems because experiencing low levels of anxiety and distress in the face of climate change is a normal response to a stressful reality. However, for some people, eco-anxiety limits daily activities and leads to symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety (Doherty, 2018; Pihkala, 2018, 2020; Rosen, 2020). Strong emotional responses to climate change can lead to action and mobilization, empowering people to change their habits and help the planet, or a debilitating paralysis when facing the immensity of the problem. When people learn about climate change without acquiring the tools to cope with the emotions that accompany this knowledge, they may experience hopelessness and denial.

We anticipate that music will transform awareness to action rather than immobilization and dread because it reduces anxiety under other high-stress conditions. Such conditions include coronary heart disease (Bradt et al., 2013), mechanical ventilation (Bradt and Dileo, 2014), cancer (Köhler et al., 2020), and invasive surgical procedures (Kühlmann et al., 2018). Music also reduces anxiety levels in people diagnosed with general anxiety disorder (Gutiérrez and Camarena, 2015) and panic disorder (Feldman et al., 2016). Music listening also increases self-efficacy (Gupta and Singh, 2020; Krause and North, 2016). Stefan Kölsch and his colleagues (2019) report that listening to heroic-sounding music, such as Epic Soul Factory’s “Legendary” or Fearless Motivation’s “Addicted to Success,” can evoke positive, exciting, constructive, and motivating thoughts. If music similarly reduces eco-anxiety and increases climate self-efficacy, there will be far-reaching implications for public health, music therapy, clinical psychology, education, activism, and climate science communicators.

MUSIC AND CLIMATE SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

Humans have transmitted information across generations through oral traditions like storytelling and song for tens of thousands of years. Stories and songs constituted the fundamental pedagogical devices of preliterate societies. Reliance on stories for millennia has evolutionarily hardwired and predisposed human brains to think in story terms. What Daniel Levitin (2021) calls “knowledge songs” preserve and transmit information about fitness hazards, ethnobiological knowledge, food gathering, morality, mythology, kinship, medicine, and practical skills.

Dahlstrom (2014) shows that storytelling increases understanding, interest, and engagement of non-expert audiences. Yet, Katz (2014) points out that scientists generally approach storytelling with caution and concern about scientific accuracy and distortion within the media. Such hesitations limit the potential of storytelling techniques in communicating climate science. Success stories and insights from cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology have advanced storytelling in other fields. Boal and Shultz (2007) demonstrate this in the workplace, while Palacios and colleagues (2015) explore the role of storytelling in healthcare. Anthony Leiserowitz, a human geographer and the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, researched the effect that watching the disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow” had on viewers’ climate-related risk perception. Though the film takes many liberties with both science and reality, Leiserowitz (2004) reports film watchers became more engaged with the subject and learned important new ideas about climate science.

Music psychologists have yet to investigate the influence of storytelling through so-called “climate music” on listeners’ ecological worldviews, their awareness of the environmental consequences of specific actions, their ascription of responsibility, their pro-environmental personal norms, and their day-to-day environmental behaviors. Wodak (2018) differentiates between musical works that “communicate” climate change and those that “convey” climate change; the former involves more literal representations of climate change data and is associated with scientific culture, while the latter involves more “evocative and poetic representation” associated with popular culture. Hill (2014) describes a third category of climate music encompassing works within acoustic ecology—recorded sounds from a range of ecological settings that explore the relationship between people and their acoustic environment. Does music from these three categories differentially influence behaviors and beliefs? If so, what features characterize the most effective music?

This line of inquiry has implications for musicians, educators, and activists. We suspect that creating, teaching, and sharing appropriate music will enhance the effectiveness of climate action campaigns and make environmental responsibilities more salient. Incorporating memorable tunes or catchy jingles related to climate action and environmental responsibility will improve information retention and recall, making it easier for individuals to adopt and apply eco-friendly behaviors. Levitin (2006) writes that musical elements such as tempo, harmony, and melody can influence how messages are perceived and remembered. In advertising, music plays an integral role in content recall, intentions to buy the product, and attitudes toward the advertisement and brand (for a review, see Raja, Anand, and Allen, 2019). The timbre, tempo, lyrics, genre, mood, and valence of the music might fit the message to reinforce it. For example, the first single from The 1975’s “Notes on a Conditional Form” features a somber piano melody backing the voice of Greta Thunberg reciting her speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2019. Alternatively, the musical features and message might be mismatched to capture attention. Childish Gambino’s “Feels like Summer” has the upbeat sound of most songs of summer, while the lyrics convey a more ominous message.

MUSICAL ENGAGEMENT AND ENVIRONMENTALISM

Moving beyond the features of music itself, we must also consider the influence of musical training, engagement, experiences, and preferences. Wu and Lu (2021) posit that music education promotes the development and maintenance of empathy and social understanding. It may follow that musical sophistication—musical skills, expertise, achievements, and related behaviors—correlates positively with environmental awareness, concern, and responsible behavior. Music psychologists have not studied whether musical sophistication predicts knowledge of climate issues, concern for the planet, and environmentally responsible behaviors; nor have we studied the relationship between different subscales of musical sophistication (active engagement, emotion, perceptual abilities, singing abilities, musical training) and environmental behaviors. If engaging with music (and musical training specifically) leads to pro-environmental behavior, all the more reason to teach it across all levels of schooling!

Collective musical experiences and shared musical preferences foster a sense of community and common identity (Andy, 2015; Hargreaves et al., 2017; Schäfer and Eerola, 2020). Social norms within such communities can influence sustainability behaviors. Aronson and O’Leary (1982-1983) show this for water conservation, while Cialdini and Reno (1990) demonstrate the influence of social norms on proper disposal of litter. As Publicover (2019) argues, music communities serve as an informal network for the social diffusion of pro-environmental values and norms. The social tendencies of a specific genre’s fans might be leveraged to encourage pro-environmental actions. Musical tastes correlate with a wide range of socio-demographic variables, including environmentally responsible behavior. For example, North and Hargreaves (2007) share that fans of soul are more likely to be vegetarian/vegan than fans of other genres, while fans of country and western, sixties pop, classical music, and opera recycle more. Pairing certain songs or genres with environmentally responsible actions could create positive associations that encourage individuals to engage in these behaviors more consistently.

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Much research is needed to evaluate both the reach of current music projects and their impact on audiences. Beyond emotional engagement and memorability, what are the characteristics of music that best motivate individuals to act? What audiences are best suited to receive or respond to musical engagement, and what audiences are most neglected by such outreach efforts? Finally, what supports do music psychologists need to expand their work into climate engagement? While much work remains to be done, music is clearly an important—in fact, an essential—part of successfully engaging the public in climate action.

Climate change poses a multifaceted threat to our planet and our mental well-being, leading to a growing need for innovative solutions that can bridge the gap between awareness and action. Music, with its profound ability to evoke emotions, shape attitudes, and foster collective identity, holds immense potential in this regard. Behavioral scientists, including environmental and music psychologists, should join forces to explore the impact of music (and the arts and humanities more generally) on our response to environmental issues. By understanding how different genres, musical elements, and levels of musical engagement influence our environmental awareness, concern, and behaviors, we can unlock new strategies for fostering a more sustainable future. Music’s capacity to reduce anxiety and increase self-efficacy suggests it may serve as a powerful tool in mitigating eco-anxiety and empowering individuals to take meaningful climate action. By integrating music into climate action campaigns, educational programs, and community engagement initiatives, we can tap into emotional and cognitive motivators of human behavior, fostering a deeper connection to environmental concerns and inspiring positive changes.

AUTHORS’ NOTES

The title of this article comes from Childish Gambino’s 2018 hit “Feels Like Summer.” The lines Air that kill the bees, that we depend upon / Birds were made for singing, waking up to no sound are reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s criticism of the use of DDT in her 1970 hit “Big Yellow Taxi.” Mitchell’s lyrics include the stanza Hey, farmer, farmer / Put away that DDT now / Give me spots on my apples / But leave me the bird and the bees / Please! (inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring). The opening quote “Maybe we underinvested in research on human behavior” was outgoing NIH-director Dr. Francis Collins’ response when asked what the NIH could have done differently during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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