This expedition continued Jana Winderen’s project Silencing of the Reefs, which began August 2011 in Iceland. Jana made underwater sound recordings of various coral reef environments encountered during the course of the voyage. These recordings will be made available to marine researchers and employed in the artist’s future sound works. The project was scientifically supported by marine biologist and Director of the Healthy Reefs Initiative, Dr. Melanie McField.

The project used a variety of recording technologies, including multi-channel and Ambisonic surround recordings of habitats and environments. The hydrophonic native Ambisonic B Format microphone is being developed by Prof. Tony Myatt (University of Surrey) and a team of European researchers.

This small (1m) array of hydrophones will capture holistic surround soundscapes that can be reproduced using standard Ambisonic reproduction technology. Using this method, sound recordings hold entire sound-fields and sounding objects. Rather than reducing a source (which might be the size of a blue whale) to a single element of sound as traditional microphones do, this technology captures the spatial distribution of sounds and resonances as entire sound objects whilst incorporating the movement of sound sources.

At the beginning of the expedition Jana Winderen participated at the launch of the Healthy Reef Report Card by the Healthy Reef Initiative in Belize City. A documentation team on board the Dardanella also produced a daily blog for the TBA21–Academy webpage in order to give a real-time picture of events as they were unfolding.