The northern coast of Jamaica once served as the backdrop for scenes in the James Bond thriller No Time to Die. But today, beneath those same turquoise waves, a real-life mission is unfolding: the race to pull a dying coral reef back from the brink.

However, the tools a team of divers are carrying to the seafloor are not what you would expect to find in a marine biologist's kit. They are installing waterproof speakers at the bottom of the ocean, and the man leading the team is not a scientist.

"It's very different from everything I did before," says Marco Barotti, an artist from Italy.

Five years ago, Barotti began creating sculptures based on 3D scans of coral. He was inspired by emerging research suggesting that sound could be the key to reviving struggling reefs. "Sound has always been at the core of my work but never at this level," he explains.

The soundtrack of the sea


To the human ear, the underwater world might seem pretty quiet, but a healthy reef is actually a cacophony of noise. It's a biological symphony of snapping shrimp, grunting fish and shifting currents. A dying reef is eerily silent.

"If a reef is alive with sound it's most likely to stay alive right? And repopulate. And when reefs degrade they grow silent," Barotti says.

. . .