(CNN) A team of scientists from the UK and Australia teamed up to use underwater loudspeakers to try and entice fish back to dead coral reefs and potentially help them recover. By replicating the sounds of healthy reefs, according to a study recently published in Nature Communications, the scientists used a process called "acoustic enrichment."

They placed loudspeakers on patches of dead coral in the Great Barrier Reef and discovered that twice as many fish arrived -- and stayed -- compared to equivalent patches where no sound was played.

Researcher Tim Gordon deploys an underwater loudspeaker on a coral reef.

"Healthy coral reefs are remarkably noisy places -- the crackle of snapping shrimp and the whoops and grunts of fish combine to form a dazzling biological soundscape. Juvenile fish hone in on these sounds when they're looking for a place to settle," said one of the study's authors, Steve Simpson, a professor of marine biology and global change at the University of Exeter.

"Reefs become ghostly quiet when they are degraded, as the shrimps and fish disappear, but by using loudspeakers to restore this lost soundscape, we can attract young fish back again."

Dead coral rubble on the recently damaged Great Barrier Reef.

Tim Gordon, the lead author of the study and another marine biologist from the University of Exeter, said the returning fish could help ecosystems "recover" and "give those degraded patches of coral a chance of new life."

Read More