WildWooHoo is a studio for science in culture that makes music, entertainment and education carrying science into the popular culture people already love, and this article sets out the commitments that guide that work, the values the studio holds to across every project, every science and every language. They are values first. Some are already visible in work the studio has released, and some are openings the work makes possible, which we name as aims, because the honest thing is to be clear about which is which.
Participation, co-creation, collaboration and community
We make work people take part in, and we build it to widen who takes part in popular music and who counts as a scientist in the popular eye. We name the practice, we write its method down so others can run it, and we stay open to scientists who make their own work, to artists who write alongside a science adviser, and to artists who work from the published record. The studio is the collaborative home that gathers the makers, the work and the advisers, and the method is itself a collaboration of two disciplines, science and song-craft, set down so the roles can be shared across more than one person. The wider reach, many makers and many fields working together across languages, is the opening the open method is built to invite.
Inclusion, equity, accessibility, diversity and representation
Membership is open by design. Scientist-artists sit at the core, and the studio stays open to any artist drawn to the science, the sound and the themes, with a science-adviser layer behind the work. An open practice draws a wider circle than a scientist-only one, and that openness is a choice the studio made on purpose. The work stays honest by engaging its science with care, as the theme and the source a song carries, across the range from researched fact to the images a culture holds about science. Equity we name as an aim: the musical science adviser, a settled and paid role in film, has appeared in music as celebrated one-offs, and the studio sets out to make that contribution a standing, payable role. Accessibility is built into the craft, so the science arrives through the music a listener already enjoys. Diversity and representation grow with the range of sciences a song can carry and with a wider picture of who a scientist is, and work across more than one language broadens that further.
Culture, identity, belonging and context
We treat science as a cultural system, carried in stories, images and meanings, so it reaches a listener through culture and as feeling first. We respect the culture of the audiences a work is made for. When a work is built for a particular community, we invite a representative of that community into the creative process and carry elements of their culture into the work, so it belongs to the people it speaks to. We respect the culture of the makers too: WELI's own work is broadly shaped by Brazilian culture, and the studio holds room for each maker's heritage and language to live in the work. Identity, belonging and context rest here, in work that is rooted in a real cultural setting and made with the people whose culture it carries.
One commitment here we hold as an opening, and we name it as an aim. The studio's material runs close to domains where Indigenous knowledges hold deep authority. The open membership makes room for Indigenous knowledge-holders to take part on their own terms, a relationship to enter with consent and authority and led by knowledge-holders themselves. The honest verb today is opening.
Emotion, resonance, curiosity, wonder and memory
The studio carries science as feeling first, by design. A finding is set inside familiar stories and relationships, so a listener meets it through an affective experience before meeting it as content, and the emotion is the carrier the science rides inside. Resonance comes from writing one line that more than one listener can read truthfully in more than one way, so the same words can reach a specialist and a stranger at once. Curiosity and wonder are shared values of the practice and themes the work returns to, drawn from the natural world the science describes and carried as motif into accessible song. Memory follows from holding the work to pop song-form, built to move a room, so the science travels home inside something a listener already enjoys. The fuller emotional reach at album scale is what EVER+GROW is being built to carry, and that work is in active construction.
Translation, storytelling, meaning-making and multilingualism
Translation is the problem the studio exists to solve: how a specialist finding becomes a song a non-specialist meets as music first. The mechanism we name is nature-centred translation, reaching a listener through familiar creatures, places and human stories, carried by movement, character and feeling. Storytelling is built into the method, which grows two parallel stories from one theme, a scientific one and a human one, tied together through shared place, tone and character. Meaning-making is how science travels, so the meaning is the medium through which the science is met. Multilingualism is in the work from the origin, because the craft is proven native to more than one language, and since it depends on a language's own everyday idiom, it opens room for works in further tongues. WELI's bilingual life as a Brazilian living in Australia is the lived ground for this.
Impact, engagement, learning and how science and society grow together
Impact runs through the craft, which lets a listener take in the work as feeling and meet the science through it. The studio holds learning lightly and on purpose: a sci pop song works as pop first, and the learning is the science a listener can meet through the work, an experience to absorb in passing, kept accurate by the science-adviser layer. The register the studio holds is appreciation, belonging and reflection, on the natural world, on how we relate to one another and to other creatures, with any measured shift still to be shown. The legacy the studio is building is a place for science and for scientists in popular music, meant to outlast any one record: a named, repeatable role and a method anyone can run, so the field widens with each person who joins. The studio holds these commitments now, in public and on the record, and builds the rest in the open.