Though they “weren’t really going for animal sounds” while recording their new project, composer Damien Ricketson and sound artist Diana Chester fell in love with the “tiniest sound” of a starfish inching its way across a rock pool.

“The sound it made was really surprising,” Chester tells Limelight. “It almost sounded like a heartbeat – a really rhythmic, consistent, relatively low pitch sound.”

Though intended as a “geophony of sounds”, Listening to Earth uses the starfish as a recurring feature of its musique concréte concoction, which blends the familiar and unfamiliar sounds found at the beach. There are waves crashing, yes, but there’s also the rumble they create deep within the sand. There’s wind, too, but not as you know it.

Diana Chester and Damien Ricketson. Photo © Stefanie Zingsheim/University of Sydney

Installed in the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum from 13–18 February, Listening to Earth is an immersive audiovisual installation work that “brings the beach to the gallery” while exploring the vibrational interplay of sea and land. Using field recordings captured...