A new work by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, Deep seeing currents, opened in the Artis aquarium on Saturday 3 October.
It fills the round room on the east side of the building, once a lecture hall and later home to a dune diorama.
Artis director Rembrandt Sutorius says anyone can now visit real dunes, but more people have been to the moon than to the deep sea floor.
Since reopening in June, the renovated aquarium has drawn about 400,000 visitors and shows almost every layer of marine life except the deep sea floor, although 90% of the world’s water is deep sea.
Sutorius first contacted Eliasson two and a half years ago.
Eliasson made some of the recordings himself while diving in the Pacific with his son, and also used material from scientific institutions such as NIOZ.
Because of the great depth, all the sounds are low, under 20 Hertz.
A semicircular tunnel behind heavy curtains, with a poem by Eliasson in English and Dutch, leads into a pitch-black room with an uneven floor.
Points of light appear in the dark: red stands for the sound of earthquakes as tectonic plates move, and white stands for animals.