Sounding the Maltese Archipelago Frequencies

The vibrations of the dolphins’ sounds I encountered in the Maltese waters last summer still echo in me, entangled with the constant hum of the fish farm machinery in the far south of the Mediterranean. Their clicks and whistles interwove with the metallic noises of engines and pumps, creating a living acoustic memory, reminding me how little we know about the underwater sonic world. That encounter became the starting point of my interest in relational listening: an active, deep, and situated listening that allows me to engage with complex negotiations and entanglements in the underwater world.

This contribution emerges from my fieldwork within Water Narratives—Rethinking the ‘Elsewhere’, a transdisciplinary and transacademic research project I initiated involving marine biologists, NGOs, maritime museums, ocean activists, and sound artists.¹ It explores oceans and islands, focusing mainly on the Mediterranean and Pacific oceans. It is inspired by the Caribbean philosopher and poet Éduard Glissant’s idea of “archipelago thinking,” which envisions the world as interconnected islands, contributing to the dismantling of colonial patterns of division and exclusion.² This project reimagines Southern archipelagos—such as Palermo, Malta, and Chiloé in Chilean Patagonia—as spaces of possibility rather than remote peripheries, while questioning Eurocentric perspectives on multispecies and more-than-human relations from a Global South point of view, and addresses the urgent ecological crises threatening marine biodiversity and the fragile balance of archipelago ecosystems today. In particular, this contribution focuses on the Maltese archipelago as a sonic archive of relations, exploring how listening to environmental sounds can open ways to reflect on the different negotiations of exploitation, shelter, loss, and resistance taking place in the Mediterranean.

During my fieldwork in Malta in April 2025, I met the marine biologists and sailors Patrizia Patti and Giovanni Da Lazzari, founders of the local organization EcoMarine Malta, with whom I am currently collaborating to archive the Maltese sonic entanglement of humans, dolphins, and marine infrastructures: industrial sea bream and tuna farms, fishing boats, and aquatic tourism. Starting from the Maltese islands, the project unfolds through themes such as the mainland–island relations, migration flux, and colonial maritime routes, all examined through the deep resonances of underwater soundscapes.

EcoMarine's expertise in dolphin acoustic monitoring with high-quality hydrophones provides a techno-scientific listening approach for this collaboration, focusing on the dolphins' acoustic signals, which support marine conservation and protection around aquaculture in Maltese waters. By focusing on underwater sound monitoring and dolphin behavior using non-invasive acoustic tools, EcoMarine documents marine life and the impact of underwater noise pollution, bridging science and the public by making complex data accessible. Building on this, our ongoing and future collaborations are experimenting with artistic performative sonic forms for presenting the collected data—sound compositions, installations, collective listening sessions, and water walks. These forms extend listening beyond scientific contexts, opening it up to wider publics and contributing to the conservation and protection of the Maltese marine life that faces a high risk of disappearing.

Our shared interest in exploring modes of listening took us to the Mediterranean Sea, where scientific theory gave way to artistic, embodied practices of listening. By listening together while sitting on the sailing boat, our perceptions of underwater acoustics shift into a bodily sensory experience, far from theorization. The abstract issues of underwater noise pollution and ecological violence became tangible through the sonic movements of Maltese dolphins and their encounters with fish farm machinery. Coming and going waves collide with clicks and whistles, all bouncing off and mingling with the constant metallic sounds of the fish farm infrastructure. The layered sounds resonated through this aquatic space, exemplifying a perverse yet beautiful aesthetic of pollution. Between harmony and violence, dolphins become transmitters of a peculiar environmental sound.

In this sense, this project is guided by listening practices that reveal complex relations between humans, more-than-humans, and their environments. Listening becomes an active attunement to the material, affective, and political density of water. I am inspired by hydrofeminism, seascape epistemologies, and the water of theory, which allow me to view bodies of water as archives of past and present stories and struggles, as well as water as a living entity, with agency and memory.³ Neimanis's hydrofeminism has helped me to relate to water as a material and affective presence that connects bodies, histories, and ecologies. In a different, yet related perspective, Amimoto Ingersoll and Betasamosake Simpson understand water as an ancestral and relational form of knowledge, shaping human and non-human life in interdependent ways, challenging Western extractive approaches and reminding us of responsibilities embedded in our water relationships. Together with EcoMarine, we encountered these aquatic tensions, shaped by the complex relationship between small-scale fish ships, industrial tuna farms, and marine life. These infrastructures generate sonic violence—noise that disrupts marine life—, but they also unintentionally create refuge for dolphins escaping from mass aquatic tourism, such as tourist boats and jet skis constantly harassing marine life. These sonic relations reveal more than environmental data; they mark the tension between extraction and refuge, between noise as violence and sound as more-than-human attunement. In this way, water itself becomes an archive of difference, carrying histories of empire, economies of profit, and gestures of care.

Aboard the EcoMarine sailboat, we began our search following the traces of a group of dolphins that Patrizia and Giovanni had been monitoring for almost eight years. We sailed into the Mediterranean, moving a little offshore, heading for an area with several fish farms off the coast of Malta—one of the places the group of dolphins frequently visited. While we sailed in search of the dolphins' routes, we remained silent, simply observing the open sea. One of the tactics of marine life spotting involved staying silently alert to every ripple on the water's surface, with a keen eye scanning for any signs of movement. We spent some time waiting and didn't see any movement. Patrizia said that the dolphins usually appeared around midday, heading toward the fish farms to feed on the fish scraps. Since we didn't see any visual trace of the group of dolphins, Patrizia proposed to use the hydrophone to trace the sonic waves in our underwater surroundings.

As we were deploying the 150-plus-meter cables of the high-quality hydrophone Patrizia and Giovanni use to conduct offshore research—often listening for 10 minutes per hour and recording when they spot an interesting sound—I could sense, technically, the complex history of this device that guided our underwater listening. The hydrophone, a device used for military underwater surveillance and tactics, became famous during the First World War, in particular as a passive listening device used by the Allied navies to detect German submarines (U-boats). Later, it became widespread in the 60s, moving from military use into scientific and artistic fields. Seeing the vast difference between the sophisticated hydrophone from the marine biologists and mine, a small, portable device measuring only 3 meters deep and unable to detect sounds from the deep sea, I could more acutely sense the different scales and types of listening technology that the hydrophone provided us with—a specific type of amplification of underwater listening that is impossible through our human ears. The expansive sound waves captured by this device remind us of its imperial history and humanity's aspiration to map, and therefore control, the underwater world.

On the one hand, the biologists’ techno-scientific listening device reveals the range of high and low-frequency waves through which dolphins communicate, analyzing their whistles and clicks, observing their physical interactions as they scan the mechanical structures of the fish farm. By studying these frequencies, interactions, and the disruptions caused by machinery operating within the same sonic range, EcoMarine uses this techno-listening of underwater environmental sounds to support bioacoustic data showing that dolphins are indeed present in Maltese waters—something that remains largely undocumented in current scientific studies. This lack of published research, as well as the different ecological agreements of which Malta has been a part, has made it difficult to establish marine protection policies in Malta and natural reserve zones that could prevent tourism and fishing industries from freely and uncontrollably entering marine habitats. Through what Shannon Mattern calls “listening to infrastructures,”⁴ this form of techno-listening allows the underwater sounds and their interconnected relations—both violent and harmonious—to become audible. An example of this can be found in the way Maltese dolphins have reappropriated the fish farm infrastructures, turning them into spaces of refuge and escape from the uncontrolled tourism of the Mediterranean. By archiving, classifying, and monitoring these environmental sounds, EcoMarine research highlights the frequencies that clash, cancel each other out, or, in some cases, produce an uncomfortable harmony between humans and more-than-humans.

On the other hand, my mode of listening—using a small portable hydrophone —became an intimate form of situated listening. Unable to hear very deep into the sea, I could only capture the surface’s sonic frequencies, faintly perceiving distant clicks that, as a first-time listener to marine mammals, were initially difficult to recognize. The movement of the sailing boat, cutting and colliding with the water, was the most striking part of the experience: the metallic and humming sounds revealed the materiality of the sea, creating a sense of closeness and intimacy with the immense body of Mediterranean water. My listening became situated and critical, as I attuned myself to the material infrastructures of power embedded in these particular waters.

Through this mode of listening, I returned to my research on the complex historical layers that have shaped the Maltese archipelago since 700 BC. Over centuries, it has repeatedly served as a space to be conquered and colonized: first by the Phoenicians, then by the Byzantines, the Norman County of Sicily, the Spanish, the Order of St. John, the French, and lastly by the British. An archipelago that stands as a space where the European and African continents meet, sometimes through violent encounters, and at others through moments of collaboration and solidarity. Malta’s archipelago reminds us how submerged histories continually resurface.

A deep seismic movement of colonial layers is still visible in the sonic relations of Malta’s fishing, industrial, and tourist infrastructures. When Malta gained independence in 1964 (while remaining part of the British Commonwealth) and later joined the European Union in 2004, the country became an ongoing construction site. To this day, the rapid development of new buildings and infrastructure to accommodate a growing human population and mass tourism has intensified noise pollution. Its noises and vibrations resonate across the archipelago and through the surrounding waters, intertwining with the already disturbed waterways, leaving behind (again) the needs of the underwater Maltese population. As editors Valentin Bansac, Matthias Fritsch, and others write in Ecotones: Investigating Sounds and Territories, “since the climate crisis can also be understood as a crisis of sensory perception and representation,”⁵ which compels us to search for new ways to tune ourselves in to the environmental transformations. Therefore, “the act of listening” gives space for the more-than-human voices that have long been silenced, erased, and forgotten.

By these two qualities of listening, I could sense the different forms of bodily relation toward more-than-human sonorities and how the underwater seascape spoke through these techno-scientific artifacts. Throughout the trip, we reflected on issues of power and ethics, particularly the impact of our listening and recording devices on the dolphins and their underwater environment. For the marine biologists, hydrophones represent a careful way to record and analyze data, as their presence in the ocean does not affect the dolphins’ everyday lives. For me, the intention of recording sounds in general is a form of aesthetic extractivism, which, without the consent of nature, this techno-listening continues to highlight the imbalance still present in these practices. The rich and complex sounds of the dolphins interacting with the fish farm machinery, their “safer havens,” capture the paradox and dynamics of sound, disruption, inherent violence, and unexpected, unintended refuges.

Building on this, I propose in this contribution to look at environmental sound through the lens of relational listening, where environmental sound becomes an archive of complex relations present in today’s underwater—a lively and contested space where humans and more-than-humans interact, clash, and coexist. This understanding of relational listening goes beyond the notion proposed by the composer and artist Lawrence English.⁶ He argues that relational listening takes two forms: an inner, personal relation to sound, as well as a technological aspect of the listening device. English explores how sound artists and practitioners do not consume or extract sounds but compose with them, becoming performer-listeners who recalibrate the temporal and spatial dimensions of the auditory experience. Although this approach aligns with my artistic practices and the sound composition I produced for this contribution, I investigate relational listening as a situated, ethical, and active mode of listening. By understanding my positionality in relation to my listening and my techno device recording, I acknowledge that ‘recording’ is an extractive form of engaging with the world. My relationship with the surroundings becomes unbalanced, and through an active, conscious mode of listening, I engage with this trouble. In this way, relational listening is understood from a human and more-than-human ecology—an important tool that amplifies by bringing to the surface power relations, infrastructures of power, and colonial patterns, as well as local practices of care and (in)visible solidarities.

Therefore, dolphins serve as crucial connectors between these infrastructures, articulating audible connections and ruptures. They become transmitters of these specific environmental sounds, unsettling fixed divisions between “nature” and “culture,” “human” and “non-human,” offering instead a relational acoustic field where sameness and difference are continually redefined. Glissant’s concepts of “poetics of relation” and “archipelago thinking” are indispensable for rethinking environmental sound and its transmitters as a relational listening.⁷ By reimagining islands as spaces of possibility, this project challenges the notion of peripheral margins defined by the mainland, as exemplified by Malta's state political context of ecological policymaking, which continues mainland colonial patterns of neglecting more-than-human populations. To listen across archipelagos is to trace the still-present colonial maritime legacy alongside fragile futures of multispecies solidarity. By thinking with and through archipelago imagination, it becomes possible to challenge colonial views of the world as fixed, unified continents. Instead, it envisions a “world made of islands”⁸—connected yet fragmented—marked by relation, clashes, constellation, and exchange. Archipelago thinking resists universalism, embracing multiplicity and multivocality. This perspective opens ways to move beyond colonial dichotomies, toward more fluid and relational understandings of identity and belonging.

Companion ideas, such as hydrofeminism and seascape epistemology, approach bodies of water as living archives, holding histories and ongoing struggles. Oceans emerge not as barriers or spaces to be dominated, but as corridors of connection, memory, and transformation. I am drawn to think with and through water—understanding it as a political, relational, and poetic space. Both archipelago thinking and theoretical approaches to water offer frameworks for engaging environmental underwater sound as a form of relational listening. Taken together, they provide a way of imagining worlds beyond fixed borders: spaces of encounter where difference is not erased but sustained in relation. In the sound composition produced for this contribution, the agency of the Maltese dolphins invites us to reimagine alternative forms of active and deep listening, which are urgently needed today. By challenging conventional notions of natural sound and techno-scientific listening, it proposes listening as a critical, situated, and ethical practice—one that reveals ongoing negotiations of exploitation, refuge, loss, and resistance.

Melanie Garland (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and lecturer based in Berlin. She holds a PhD in multimodal anthropology and reflexive European ethnology from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.