Ideas - The Heavy Metal Suite: Music and the Future of Mining

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Eight composers, five instruments, and a world of metal. IDEAS explores a project by the University of British Columbia called The Heavy Metal Suite that conveys the challenges and opportunities of the mining industry, through music. Each composer draws inspiration from their country’s mineral resources in their original pieces. *This episode originally aired on May 28, 2024.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. It's a packed house at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver. Are we good to try out some reverb? And a group called Axiom Brass is warming up. The musicians are about to play an experiment.

play an experiment. Can five brass instruments and eight composers convey the complexity of metal? So imagine how sand becomes silicon becomes computer chips, right? So I wanted to play with that. Zinc is a very important component in all brass instruments. So that really gives me a lot of conductivity. Music flows. You know, there's this amazing ability for it to change shape and sound can be a lot like that.

And so for me, it was a really easy connection to make. The project started at the University of British Columbia. It's an attempt to describe the conflicts, contradictions and opportunities of mining metals around the world through music. through music. The goal? To learn about the future of mining in a world with a radically changing climate. I knew that we weren't going to get far if we just sat down with people face-to-face

and said, what do you think about mining? As cars turn electric, energy grids go renewable, and industries adapt, the world will need a lot of metal. In the past, mining has caused catastrophes and conflict. So the future will rely on a delicate balance of stewardship, technology, and collaboration. Humanity has an unrivaled capacity for both destruction, but also creativity and imagination. Each composer wrote a piece of music about a mineral mined in their part of the world.

Like platinum from South Africa, zinc from China, and silver from Mexico. We bring you the Heavy Metals Suite. My name is Philippe Tortel. I'm a professor and head of the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of British Columbia. I'm also one of the founding members of the UBC Future Minerals Initiative, which is a group of scholars from across the university working with indigenous leaders and industry leaders to perhaps reimagine the future of the mineral resource sector. to perhaps reimagine the future of the mineral resource sector.

Philippe is the main organizer of this project, and I spoke with him about what he hopes to achieve with this concert. The central issue is around the invisibility of these resources and the fact that we take them for granted. Unless you live in a mining-impacted community, chances are you have no understanding of what mining looks like, feels like, smells like even. And what we were trying to do is to make that invisible slightly more visible, to really allow people to understand that these metals and minerals that are embedded in their cars and their

devices and their bodies really have a long chain of consequences all the way behind them that start from the moment that anyone's identified their signature in the ground all the way behind them that start from the moment that anyone's identified their signature in the ground, all the way down to some sort of final product. So how did you get to, from that to music? So the music was pretty important to me from the very beginning. I had done a number of projects previously where we'd used music to convey complex ideas. One of the early ones was called the Ice Core Walk. One of the early ones was called the Ice Core Walk. In your left ear, you'll hear a musical representation of the temperature record for the Ice Core site in central Antarctica.

In your right ear, you'll hear the changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. And it was the notion that music and the creative and performing arts provide a way of opening conversation that is a little bit sneaky sometimes, a little bit clever. And it allows people to let their guard down in a way that makes them a little more open, a little bit more receptive to new kinds of ways of thinking. So I had done these kinds of projects and I knew that we weren't going to get far if we just sat down with people face to face and said, what do you think about mining? You know, either people don't think about it or if they do, almost certainly they'll have very, very strong opinions and often negative opinions. And so that already sets up a very confrontational kind of conversation. If you take it from the side and you just say,

well, let's not necessarily talk about this explicitly. Let's open a space for a new kind of conversation. Let's present these ideas in maybe a slightly whimsical way that just creates a bit of space where maybe not so much space existed before. So the music was pretty important. And the idea of a suite, a heavy metal suite that would involve composers around the world was something that I'd been carrying around for probably three or four years at this point.

Tonight, Nala will be our guide on a global tour through Earth's mineral resources. I had the pleasure of introducing each piece of music. Now please welcome me in joining Nala to the stage. The music we're about to hear is filled with contradiction, tension, and beauty. And that is the story of metal. We're all going to go on an international journey together, but we are going to start, fittingly, here in Canada. And we begin not with heavy metal, but with water. On a global scale, mining uses trillions of litres of water each year. It is used in all forms of mining and processing, from extracting lithium from brine pools

to floating and separating metal ores and panning for gold in streams. T. Patrick Carabray is a Métis composer from Vancouver. Here's what Carabray says. I was inspired by the many forms that water can take, as well as its seemingly infinite flexibility. Water can be soft, yet powerful. It can move slowly and quickly, flowing, rushing, or falling, lightly or with incredible power. ¶¶ © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon The name of that music was Delo, the Mischief word for water. The composer, T. Patrick Carabray.

It was really fantastic to finally hear it all come together in the actual performance, because it's all been bits and pieces up to this point. I wonder when you thought about the relationship between water and music, where you began. Like, how would you even begin to translate the idea of water into notes and music? Well, it's a kind of longer term project for me. So maybe, yeah, probably about eight years ago, I had a commission for Canada 150. So I had a commission for a festival. And I decided that as part of that, and as an Indigenous person trying to make some kind of statement in the context of Canada 150 that I needed to broaden the scope. So being in Manitoba, I looked back and when I was a kid, Minnesota had 10,000 lakes on their license plate.

So Manitoba immediately changed theirs to say 100,000 lakes because we have 100,000 lakes. And so I called this piece 100,000 Lakes. And the idea was to give my audience the opportunity to consider Manitoba in the context of prehistory. So how did those 100,000 lakes happen? So we had glaciation, we had the melting of the glacier. You know, at one point, Winnipeg was, you know, hundreds of feet underwater, it was the bottom of an ocean. And so really just going like, okay, yes, we're celebrating Canada 150, but it's in the context of a geology and a geography that's evolved over millions of years

and the context of, you know, people being here long before you can even imagine and that that culture and that history needs to be somehow positioned. The life of water is so important to the people who have lived on those territories for so long and it's been so difficult because I used to work a lot in northern Manitoba with university courses on First Nations. And many of those First Nations have been moved from their traditional territories because of hydro dams. And so the displacement and all, you know, people need to think about that stuff.

And water can help us because who doesn't love water unless you're being flooded? You know what I mean? So it's one of those things where I think for me it's – and then when I came out here, I was asked to write a piece on the water protocols of the First Nations here. And so that gave me another opportunity to connect with particularly the water carriers here who are women, you know, and to hear their stories and hear about the rituals and the ceremony and all of those things and to use music to help because music flows, you know, there's this amazing ability for it to change shape and move fast, move slow, do all of those things that water does. So sound can be a lot like that. And so for me, it was a really easy connection to make.

The next metal is actually here with us on stage. Zinc, along with copper, is an essential component in brass. That means it's one of two medals tonight that you'll actually be able to hear resonating and vibrating. Composer Yao Chen wanted to focus on the dual nature of zinc. He says, Zinc is brittle at room temperature, but soft and malleable when heated. Although pure zinc is hyperreactive with other metals,

it can also be used to protect them from corrosion, forming sacrificial coatings. The duality of the metal, brittle and soft, reactive and protective, is musically reflected as somber moments interspersed with flashes of vivid interaction. The piece takes inspiration from a Chinese folk melody called A Little River Flowing. Along with symbolizing the water used in mining, Yao says, the melody originates from Yunnan province in southwest China, which has the country's largest lead and zinc reserves. The music is cyclical, opening and closing with a solo trombone. The speed and intensity of the music gradually increases and decrease in an auditory parallel of chemical reactions. At the end of the music gradually increases and decrease in an auditory parallel of chemical reactions. At the end of the movement, the activity slackens and the instrumental lines thin out

until only one remains. This is a metaphor for surplus and scarcity and a call to action for global environmental stewardship. This is Zinc. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon © BF-WATCH TV 2021 The End © B Emily Beynon Thank you. applause That was Zinc from composer Yao Chen. The folk melody from Yunnan that I mentioned on stage, Little River Flowing, sounds like this. So very, very little. It sounds like a river flowing. Yeah, because it's kind of cascading and flowing downward. Just a quick thing about Yunnan. It's not just a place where there are zinc mines, but it's also a place where zinc is recycled.

Right. How did that kind of cyclical nature of the metals industry inform your thinking about this music? Yeah. Well, my music is also cyclical too, right? I mean, in terms of how I use these materials. For example, this folk song is recycled in my piece.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, but it's transformed and transfigured and in my own personal unique way of using it. So then there's so many recycling and this way of presenting music. I'm coming from this classical music training, and all the ideas, all the compositional tools are coming from the past, from the ancestors.

So I'm trying to combine all these things. So it's recycling. The newness coming from this recycling process. You're listening to Ideas and to an episode called The Heavy Metals Suite. Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now.

Particularly in the face of existential climate change, perhaps the greatest challenge we face is the need to both rapidly and also equitably move the transition towards renewable energies. And at the same time to supply those mineral resources that are going to be critical in that transition. This is not the job only of academics or government leaders or policy makers or industry, but it's the job of all of us collectively as a society. And it's for this reason that the Heavy Metal Suite project was created to bring together people from across different segments of society to ignite a new conversation, to ignite creativity and inspiration, to bring new ideas to bear in solving this collective challenge.

That's Philippe Tortel from UBC speaking to a sold-out crowd at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver. I spoke with four of the composers behind the Heavy Metals suite, but there was much more music. metals suite. But there was much more music. Lithium, silver, platinum, and gold. And right now, copper. Composer Valeria Valle lives near the Atacama Desert in Chile. For inspiration, she records the natural sounds near her home. For example, here's what the Atacama sounds like at night. For her copper composition, she didn't have to go far to get natural sounds. There's a large copper mine in the desert mountains near her home.

Can you talk about your experience in visiting a copper mine? Where I live, on the mountainside, on the other side is the copper mine. So I went down to that other side, and I had to sign some permits to be able to record there. I was so impressed by the machinery, the machines that move and all the people that are required to work these machines. It's so impressive how they extract this mineral, all the tunnels that are required. And, you know, one does not imagine that from those depths we can pull out such an important mineral. The mineral is extracted from the earth.

It's something magical. And it makes you think how man was able to discover that such a rock could become something so important. You know, I felt overwhelmed. It supersedes the imagination to be in a place so big. And this mine is not the biggest mine in Chile. Thinking that this mine gives economic sustenance to the country, and it made me think of all the people that are required to reach this goal.

What do you want people to walk away with once they've heard the piece? The most important part is for them to reflect on what sustainable mining means, that minerals are a part of life, but we have to learn how to be friends with these minerals and how to take care of the planet. And also that music can transport and take people and give them this scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge. científico.

The next piece comes from Chile, the world's largest producer of copper. It is called Kipros 29, 29 being the atomic number of copper. By the year 2035, just 10 years from now, global demand for copper is expected

to double to 50 million metric tons per year. Transition to green technologies will, more than any other metal, rely on copper. As of now, it's not clear where all of that copper will come from. Over the coming decade, the anticipated copper supply gap is 10 million metric tons per year. Composer Valeria Vale Martinez says, in composing Kypros 29, I wanted to sonically represent the different stages of copper extraction and processing. The piece consists of eight parts, processing. The piece consists of eight parts, exploration, extraction, crushing, grinding, flotation, smelting, electro-refining, and waste management. The intrinsic chemical properties of copper are also represented in the movement. Kipros 29 reflects the particular geography and climate of Chile's northern mining regions,

a bone-dry landscape of barren rocks shaped by sun and wind. The interplay of climate and geology is reflected in the instrumental sounds of the brass quintet, which range from light and airy to grounded and solid. This provides a metaphor for the challenges ahead as we seek new mineral resources to harvest energy from the sun and wind. Here is Kipro's 29. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcriptF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcriptF-WATCH TV 2021 Thank you. Copper is one of those elements that's probably hardest to get around in the green energy transition. Philippe Tartel, UBC. Copper is used in wiring in absolutely staggering quantities. And until there's some fundamental breakthrough in quantum physics, we're still going to need copper to conduct electricity. And it is also clear that we really don't know where that extra copper is going to come from.

So global resource economists talk about a copper supply gap, which is on the order of, again, billions of tons. And I'm told, if I recall the statistic correctly, the amount of copper that we're missing is equivalent to the amount of copper that's needed to meet the Paris, the 2015 Paris climate agreements. So that's a pretty big gaping hole. Now, there are other elements that are probably easier to substitute or have different resource demand equations. Lithium, for example, is a really good example. Lithium is used in rechargeable batteries and particularly these days in electric vehicles. A Tesla would have 50 to 60 kilograms of lithium in the battery. There's actually more than enough lithium on earth to supply all of our demands

for many, many, many years. The problem there is not a problem of supply. It's a problem of geopolitics, environmental issues, and so on. Whereas copper is just a matter of where is this stuff? Now, onto the flip side of what the trade-offs are around some of these solutions, I think that's also not really clear because we haven't really thought about doing, until pretty recently, totally new kinds of mining. A lot of the mining is still based on crushing, grinding, flotation. A lot of the techniques are still techniques that have existed for decades, if not more. Is there work being done on trying to figure out different ways?

There is a lot of work. For example, there's a lot of people who are drawing inspirations from nature, particularly in the microbial world in the era of molecular biology and metagenomics. We're learning that microbial signatures in the rocks provide a very efficient way to localize mineral resources, essentially pinpointing the search for this proverbial needle in a haystack. Microbes are also seen to be useful in terms of waste management, dealing with this problem I mentioned before about acid mine waste. And so that's a really good example. There's economic incentives and economic innovation in terms of shaking up the business model that's been traditionally based on very, very large multinational corporations that essentially control all elements and breaking that model apart into many, many distributed small-scale actors that can be based in communities, for example. And that allows for much more innovation, much more rapid deployment of technology. The way it works now, the capital investment for a mine is so large that there's a business plan

that's set. And once that's set in stone, it's not particularly nimble. And it's maybe not empathetic to the local concerns. Yeah. I mean, I think that's changing. I think the mining industry is recognizing that they need to be proactive and they need to take a leadership in transforming this industry. We talk sometimes about water and how it could maybe even start conflict in the world. I wonder what your thoughts are about where the shortages and the problems with these elements might lead us politically in the world. Right. Yeah, that's an interesting and a complicated question. But there are certain

minerals for which there is a preponderance of supply. By that, I mean more than 90% localized into a certain country. So 90% of the world's cobalt, I believe, which is used in battery comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there's also the processing. So it's not just where the metal comes from, but which companies are processing those metals to make them available for final products. And a lot of what we've seen in the United States with the Inflation Reduction Act and all of this green energy technology and the startup of processing activity actually in Canada as well, is really a response to a trend towards a very, very strong concentration of either extraction or processing capabilities in countries that presumably, one might say, could hold the world hostage for a supply of these

really critical minerals. Just looking back at this very short conversation and the list of challenges that you have raised and have been raised by this whole event, I wonder just if you could make a general statement as to how optimistic or not you are about us finding solutions to some of these really complicated challenges ahead. Well, I'm an optimist by nature. And I think humanity has an unrivaled capacity for both destruction, but also creativity and imagination. It seems that we need to let our backs get pushed pretty far up against the wall before we react. I do think that there is going to be a lot of disruption. I think there are going to be a lot of people who are negatively impacted.

negatively impacted. So that is not a good news story. But I do also think that at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, when there are no other alternatives, we will be creative enough and cooperative enough ultimately to find some sort of a path forward. Our final piece of music comes from a place where very little mining happens at all. Perhaps the only thing that's mined there is Bitcoin. Chris Schaaf is an American composer from California, and the element in question is silicon. After oxygen, silicon is the second most abundant element on Earth.

It is in rocks and sand and gravel. But pure elemental silicon is much rarer in nature. The flat and shiny silicon wafers used for electronic components are only a recent human invention. They're made by refining silica sand into pure blocks, which are then sliced into sheets about the thickness of a fingernail. Over the past half century, these thin silicon wafers and their embedded circuits have led to the growth of digital technologies around the world. Chafe says, my home near the San Francisco Bay in Northern California is in Silicon Valley, known worldwide for its deposits of cash rather than sand and synonymous with techno investment.

The music was inspired by the contrasting properties of silicon containing sand and pure silicon. Computer simulation was used to describe the chaotic distribution of sand grains as compared to the highly ordered nature of pure silicon crystals. The movement of particles through space and time was mapped musically into dynamic melodies, rhythms, and articulations.

If Silicon Valley itself has a form to draw upon, it should include stark juxtapositions in a turbulent history. Unlike the smooth, shiny surface of a silicon wafer, the truth underneath is bumpy and wrinkled, filled with interesting textures of an indigenous world that has largely been undone and glossed over. The silicon theme represents my musical expression of the valley's millennia, its turbulent recent centuries, its high-speed present, and even some whispers of its possible future. This is Silicon. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 You were listening to the Heavy Metals Suite. Special thanks to Axiom Brass,

Tall Ten Elder, Alan Edzerza, and all of the composers. And to Philippe Tartel, who organized the event. Thank you as well to Graham Toussaint, sound mixer at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver. And to Anna Park, who provided Spanish translation. There is a book, Heavy Metal, featuring reflections by the composers and in-depth analysis of

the issues facing the mining industry around the world. We have a link to a free download on our website, cbc.ca slash ideas. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast. If you liked the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. This episode was produced by Matthew Lazen-Ryder. Technical producer, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.