What is the sound of a starfish? It’s a strange question with an answer, according to academic Diana Chester, that is even more bizarre.

“You don’t imagine it sounds like much,” says Chester, a sound studies scholar at the University of Sydney who specialises in uncovering hidden sonic worlds. “But we took a hydrophone, a kind of round microphone with a weight on it, and sank down to the bottom of a water in a rockpool right next to a starfish, and you could hear kind of pulses like a heartbeat. I was like, ‘Whoa!’”

Now that unexpected sound has been combined with a host of other field recordings from the NSW coast in an immersive installation at the university’s Chau Chak Wing Museum.

Called Listening to Earth, it is a collaboration between Chester, composer and researcher Damien Ricketson from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and video artist Fausto Brusamolino.

Using a range of specialised microphones the Chester and Ricketson captured sounds of the ocean, wind and sand from around Jervis Bay, Maroubra and Newcastle. The sounds were then woven into a 40-minute composition.

Visitors to the installation enter a darkened room where they invited to experience Ricketson’s composition seated on benches that vibrate with the sounds while watching Brusamolino’s abstract video that also reacts to the sounds.

“It’s a quite tactile experience in there,” says Ricketson. “So you actually feel vibrations when there are low frequency sounds in the mix. You feel it through your bum if you’re sitting on the benches.

“I’ve had an ongoing fascination with music that in some ways bypasses the brain and acts directly on the body. You can think of the whole body as an ear, perhaps.”