SIREN SONGS: A SOUND ODYSSEY
22.07.2026 ART & CULTURE
Chris was a founding member of the influential Sheffield based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire. Since then, he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world, both for his own compositions and for the nature documentaries he has worked on for decades, many of them alongside his friend and colleague David Attenbororough.
As a freelance composer and sound recordist Watson specialises in creating spatial sound installations. He is an expert in the use of hydrophones, which allow underwater sounds to captured with startling fidelity. As Chris writes in the book, “the seas are not just the largest collection of habitats on this blue planet – they also have the richest soundscapes”.
The composition he created for us is a marine sound voyage that consists of a fluid montage of recordings from ten separate locations around the world. Chris describes the work as “an ancient story of connection through a single ocean of sound, guided by a collection of unique songs and signals to evoke a haunting sense of spirit and place. From waves breaking on Positano’s beach, we dive below the surface and are then guided around the world's oceans in a symphony of the deep”.
The book that accompanies this audio work has been illustrated by Flaminia Veronesi, an artist based in Milan who works in a variety of mediums, exploring the fantastic and the marvellous through a playful approach to artistic practice. Some of the works Flaminia created especially for this project are reproduced here.
Siren Songs has been published just as the world turns its attention to one of the founding texts of the Western canon, the epic poem The Odyssey. This is also an account of a sea voyage, one that describes the long and difficult journey home of its hero, Odysseus, after the end of the Trojan War. It’s a journey that, in one of its most famous episodes, has a strong connection with Positano and the hotel our family opened here in 1951.
Le Sirenuse takes its name from the Sirens of ancient legend. Offshore, clearly visible from the hotel, are a group of three small islands that were once known by just this name: Le Sirenuse. They are mentioned by the Roman geographer Strabo in the first century BCE as the Sirenussai – the place where the Sirens dwell.
Anyone who has read the work associated with an author called Homer will know about the scene in which Odysseus and his men are forced to sail past the islands of the Sirens, one which is reproduced with a couple of small variations in Christopher Nolan’s recent film version.
Odysseus is bound to the mast with stout ropes, while his men have their ears plugged with wax. This, the sorceress Circe had told the warrior king, was the only way he could hope to listen to the Sirens’ beautiful, irresistible song of seduction and live to tell the tale.
It’s a fable within a fable that touches on two perceived dangers that obsessed the ancient world: the desire for forbidden knowledge, and the way beautiful women were always somehow seen to be distracting men from their ever so important manly work.
Back in the eighth century BCE, round about the time The Odyssey was written or compiled, Sirens were very different from the mermaids with which they are identified today. Depictions of mythical sea creatures that were half woman, half fish are unknown before the early Middle Ages. Instead, the Sirens of Homer’s era had the body, feet and wings of a bird; only the head was female. (This explains the current name by which the Le Sirenuse islands are known – Li Galli, literally ‘The Hens’).
In the ancient world, birds were associated with the underworld, or with knowledge beyond our human ken. Greek and Roman emperors and generals would often base their decisions on the intepretation of avian behaviour by omen readers known as augurs or auspexes, literally ‘those who look at birds’. So the Sirens were not just female temptresses. They were revealers of forbidden truths, vectors of enlightenment.
This is very much the interpretation Nolan has adopted in his cinematic retelling of the Homeric epic. His Odysseus is a man who thirsts after knowledge but who is also tortured by it – because what the Sirens offer him is the self-knowledge he has long tried to dodge or repress.
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At no point in the short sequence Nolan dedicates to the episode do we hear the Sirens’ famous song – a bold move, one that places us in the shoes (or sandals) of the temporarily deaf crew, who witness their usually self-composed commander’s yells and desperate attempts to free himself, and are left wondering what sounds or words could possibly have provoked this mix of anguish and desire.
For years, curious students of ancient lore and mythology have pondered the question of how the legend of the Sirens’ song might have arisen. Is there any sound in nature that might have disturbed passing sailors and filled them with sudden yearning and strange desires?
It turns out that there is. The Mediterranean monk seal is today one of the world’s most endangered marine mammal species, with less than a thousand individuals known to exist over several scattered sites from the eastern Aegean to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Once, however it was abundant all over the Mediterranean. Its song is a mix of eerie moans and screams, some of them resemblng the cries of women or newborn babies. Imagine these emanating from a fogbound island as a trireme or fishing boat sailed past, and it’s easy to see how sailors long separated from their families back home may have been both disturbed and strangely drawn in by these ethereal songs.
Chris Watson’s sound composition includes the ‘songs’ of two other pinnipeds that are closely realted to the monk seal – the Atlantic grey seal, and the bearded seal, which he recorded under the Arctic sea ice off the coast of Svalbard. These haunting sounds take us right to the heart of Mediterranean myth-making, and remind us just how enduring are the stories we weave to make sense of the world around us.
Freely available to guests of Le Sirenuse, Siren Songs is placed in guestrooms and in the Don’t Worry Bar where Chris Watson’s sound installation plays during the day on a continuous loop.
Artwork © Flaminia Veronesi
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