Can you imagine your next dive with a singing sculpture sitting beside the coral reef? The coral reefs along Jamaica's North Coast are testing a restoration technique that sounds straight out of a science-fiction film: Italian artist Marco Barotti has sunk a collection of solar-powered underwater speakers into the sea, playing the sounds that a healthy coral reef should naturally produce, to call fish and coral larvae back home. This is far more than a piece of performance art — a 2024 paper from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the United States has already shown that this "acoustic enrichment" can boost coral larval settlement rates by up to 7 times. In this piece, the Editor breaks down exactly how the CORAL SONIC RESILIENCE project works, why the science holds up, and why, as a diver, this is something worth keeping in mind.
Why Is a Healthy Coral Reef "Noisy"? Sound Is Actually the GPS Coral Larvae Use to Find Home
You might assume the underwater world is quiet — in fact, it's the complete opposite. A healthy coral reef is a 24-hour, non-stop marketplace, its soundscape packed with the grunts and clicks of fish, and the crackle of tiny creatures called pistol shrimp, whose snapping claws produce popcorn-like bursts in the water.
The Snaps of Pistol Shrimp and the Grunts of Fish Are Signposts for Coral Larvae
After coral spawn, their larvae drift in the water for days to weeks, during which time they must find a suitable reef substrate to settle on. The problem is that visibility underwater is limited — so how do larvae choose? The answer is by listening. Research shows that coral larvae treat the lively sounds of a bustling reef as a signal that says "business is good here, this is a place to settle," and conversely avoid the silence of dead reefs.
The First Sign of a Declining Reef Is That It Goes Quiet
This is why scientists have recently begun treating underwater soundscapes as an indicator of reef health. After a coral reef suffers large-scale coral bleaching and a collapse of its biological community, what disappears isn't just colour — the sound disappears too. The pistol shrimp dwindle, the fish leave, and all that remains above the surface is the sound of waves. For coral larvae still drifting in the water, that silence means "nothing left here, don't stop." Once a reef goes quiet, it falls into a vicious cycle: the quieter it is, the fewer new settlers it attracts; the fewer settlers, the quieter it becomes.
The CORAL SONIC RESILIENCE Project: A Bold New Experiment in Coral Restoration Using Underwater Speakers
This is the cycle Marco Barotti wants to break. This Berlin-based Italian media artist bridges art and acoustic ecology. In December 2024, he deployed the first batch of prototypes around Feridhoo Island in the Maldives, and in April 2026 he brought an upgraded version of his underwater sculptures to Jamaica's North Coast.
Solar-Powered Underwater Speakers Combined with 3D-Printed Ceramic Sculptures Modelled on Bleached Coral
CORAL SONIC RESILIENCE is far more sophisticated than simply tying a speaker to a rock and dropping it in. Marco Barotti has 3D-printed an entire collection of underwater sculptures from ceramic and calcium carbonate, with forms drawn directly from 3D scans of bleached coral — essentially recreating the shapes of dead reefs. Each sculpture simultaneously functions as a sound emitter and a physical habitat: solar panels on the surface provide power, while underwater the sculptures play original soundscapes recorded from healthy reefs in the Maldives and Jamaica. The sculptures' porous surfaces also allow fish to shelter inside and algae to take hold; in theory, coral larvae can also settle on these surfaces.
Why Jamaica's North Coast? The Real Struggles Behind the No Time to Die Filming Location
Jamaica's North Coast is the very place where the 2021 film No Time to Die was filmed around Port Antonio, and it was once one of the most iconic coral reef sites in the Caribbean. After being repeatedly battered from the 1980s onwards by Hurricane Allen, a mass die-off of long-spined sea urchins (Diadema antillarum), overfishing, and coastal nutrient pollution, Jamaica's coral cover fell from over 50% to single digits — a collapse comprehensively documented in a landmark 1994 paper by Hughes published in Science, and to this day widely regarded as one of the world's most challenging coral restoration environments. By choosing this location, Marco Barotti is effectively placing his project in the most difficult examination possible — whether it can reawaken an ecosystem on a reef in this condition is the ultimate test.
New Evidence for Coral Restoration: A 2024 WHOI Paper Shows Sound Can Increase Larval Settlement Rates by Up to 7 Times
The art project may sound romantic, but Marco Barotti's confidence in pushing it forward is backed by hard data.
A Controlled Experiment Across Three Reef Sites in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands
A research team led by PhD candidate Nadège Aoki and marine biologist Aran Mooney at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) published a paper in Royal Society Open Science in March 2024. The study was conducted at three reef sites along the southern shore of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands: the relatively healthy Tektite reef, and two severely degraded sites, Cocoloba and Salt Pond. The team placed underwater speakers at the degraded reef sites and played recordings of fish calls and pistol shrimp snaps captured from the healthy reef, then compared coral larval settlement rates between locations with and without acoustic playback.
Larval Settlement Rates 1.7 Times Higher on Average, Up to 7 Times Higher at Peak
The experiment used mustard hill coral (Porites astreoides). The results showed that locations with healthy reef sound playback had, on average, 1.7 times higher coral larval settlement rates than those without, with some sites reaching up to 7 times higher. The paper also highlights a key detail: settlement rates declined with distance from the speakers, yet even at 30 metres away, rates remained higher than in the control group with no acoustic enrichment. This directly demonstrates that sound doesn't just influence behaviour in the sense that "fish prefer a lively environment" — even planktonic larvae that haven't yet become coral use their sense of hearing to choose where to settle, and the effect extends well beyond the immediate vicinity of the speakers. The paper concludes that acoustic enrichment has the potential to become a scalable new tool in coral restoration, filling a gap alongside existing techniques such as coral gardening and selective breeding.
A separate study by a British and Australian team conducted earlier at the Great Barrier Reef (published in Nature Communications in 2019) also found that degraded reef areas with healthy reef sound playback saw fish numbers double and species diversity increase by 50% within just a few weeks. Coral recovery requires not only larval settlement but also fish to graze down the macroalgae that smothers coral — once that chain is connected, the odds of successful coral restoration truly improve.
What This Means for Divers: The Underwater Soundscape Is the Missing Piece in the Coral Restoration Puzzle
At this point, you might be wondering: what does any of this have to do with the Editor's next dive at Orchid Island or Kenting? It has everything to do with it.
The Underwater Soundscape Method: Stop and Listen for 30 Seconds
On your next dive, during your safety stop, the Editor recommends doing something most divers have never tried: slow down the rhythm of your regulator exhales, come to a complete stop, hold your breath for 30 seconds, and really listen. If that reef is still alive, you'll hear a constant background of rapid, crackling snaps — that's pistol shrimp at work. Every now and then you may also hear a deeper, lower grunt — that's a parrotfish or Grouper communicating. If a reef sounds thin, leaving only the sound of the current, that's not a problem with your ears — that reef is going quiet, and it's telling you something is very wrong. Making "breath-hold listening" a personal habit is a free health check for any reef.
Don't Let Boat Noise Become "Sound Pollution" for Reefs
On the flip side, the propellers, generators, and sudden acceleration of dive boats are all counter-productive noise in the context of coral restoration. International studies have already shown that boat noise can interfere with coral larvae finding their home, and can scare away the small fish that tend the reef. Next time you're choosing a liveaboard or a day-trip dive site, ask one extra question: "Does the boat cut the main engine and switch to a mooring line when over the dive site?" Whether that small detail is observed or not is often the dividing line between a responsibly operated dive outfit and one that simply cuts corners.
Closing Thoughts: Coral Restoration Has More Than One Path — Next Time You Dive, Give Your Ears a Turn
CORAL SONIC RESILIENCE is not the only answer — coral restoration never has been. Coral gardening, heat-resistant genetic strains, sea urchin restoration, reducing land-based pollution: every path must be pursued simultaneously. But the most captivating thing about Marco Barotti's experiment on Jamaica's North Coast is this: it takes "sound" — something divers have always treated as mere background — and places it back at the centre. The next time you stop underwater and hold your breath to listen, you're personally verifying whether that reef still has a future.
Where is the "noisiest" reef you've ever dived? Leave a comment on the BlueTrend community and let the Editor know — the next piece will compile a reader-voted list of the "reefs that sing the loudest."
Sources:
- "Soundtrack of the sea: divers use underwater speakers to help dying coral reefs," The Guardian, 24 April 2026
- Aoki, N., Weiss, B., Jézéquel, Y., Zhang, W. G., Apprill, A. & Mooney, T. A. (2024) "Soundscape enrichment increases larval settlement rates for the brooding coral Porites astreoides," Royal Society Open Science, 11(3): 231514 (source for the average 1.7× and up-to-7× larval settlement data)
- Gordon, T. A. C., Radford, A. N., Davidson, I. K. et al. (2019) "Acoustic enrichment can enhance fish community development on degraded coral reef habitat," Nature Communications, 10: 5414 (source for the Great Barrier Reef fish numbers doubling and 50% species diversity data)
- Hughes, T. P. (1994) "Catastrophes, phase shifts, and large-scale degradation of a Caribbean coral reef," Science, 265(5178): 1547–1551 (landmark reference for Jamaica's coral cover decline from 50% to single digits, sea urchin collapse, and phase shift)
- Marco Barotti project page: Coral Sonic Resilience
- Chinese-language science summary references: Sonic youth: Healthy reef sounds increase coral settlement (ScienceDaily via WHOI press release); Can Underwater Speakers Save the World's Dying Coral Reefs? (Katie Couric Media)
