Can Music Change the World? Expanding Environmental Awareness Through Multisensory Experience Design Using Music and Food

Although many creatives might want their practice to make a difference to key social and environmental challenges, selecting focal issues and finding appropriate approaches can be difficult. This chapter outlines the authors’ developing position regarding how musicians might drive action on the climate crisis through transdisciplinary innovation. These themes are explored through the lens of Unusual ingredients (https://unusualingredients.co), the authors’ ongoing artistic collaboration, which draws on the power of music to deepen the sensory experiences of eating and drinking. The contention is that by pursuing such transdisciplinary opportunities and alliances musicians can act as ‘artistic citizens’, catalysing change on pressing social and environmental challenges, whilst opening up new and exciting pathways for creative collaboration. Based on their previous practice through Unusual ingredients, the authors explore some key issues in food security and sustainability, and reflect on how music might productively drive engagement with these. Based on this discussion, it is argued that arts and culture have an important role to play in building both shared understanding about the challenges we face, and collective imagination about what a more just and sustainable future might be like. Three artistic strategies through which artists might engage with social and environmental challenges are then proposed: (1) raising consciousness of systemic global or planetary issues through sensory experience; (2) using co-creation to explore local climate action priorities; and (3) acting as social imaginaries by bringing into view alternative, more hopeful futures.