Some of the experiments «don’t make sense, but they are quite logical. Birds are good at memorizing complex sounds, so you can «record» data on them, and you will get a kind of «flash drive»
YouTuber Benn Jordan proved that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. He converted a PNG image into an audio wave and then tried to «record» it into the memory of a young starling so that the image could be retrieved and restored. According to his (very rough) calculations, data transmission system on birds can provide speeds of about 2 MB/s.
At the beginning of the video, Jordan explains some of the background to this experiment. In particular, he explained why he did not use the well-known repetition skills of parrots. In his opinion, songbirds have some of the most developed vocal abilities in the animal kingdom, so they were the best choice. A special feature of songbirds is the syrinx organ located at the junction of the trachea and bronchi. It is tuned by independently controlled muscle groups to control the tone and speed of sound, which provides extraordinary vocal flexibility. Due to the bilateral structure of the syrinx, it is even possible to reproduction of complex acoustic effects.
The experimental starling left the nest early and was found on the roadside as a baby. It is believed that early nest abandonment is related to the stress of being near a busy railroad track. Young songbirds learn their songs by imitation, so they can be seen as «blank canvases» for preserving sounds. This particular starling, raised by humans, has proven to be even more susceptible to the reproduction of alien audio forms — camera shutter sounds, distant human speech, etc.
At about the 17th minute of the video, Jordan begins an attempt to retain a drawing of a simple bird in the starling’s memory using sound and a smartphone. The experimenter placed the drawing in a spectral synthesizer and converted it into a waveform. In this way, he was able to effectively transmit the image to the starling.
The researcher conducted a session of playing the starling’s sounds and recording its songs afterward. When he returned home and reviewed the «many gigabytes» of audio from the session, a characteristic waveform caught his attention. Zooming in helped reveal an image of a bird located much later than the time he played the sample spectrogram from his smartphone to the starling. This could mean only one thing — the image of the bird was reproduced by the bird itself.
Benn Jordan goes on to delve into technical details about the audio and graphic files, and then offers rough math calculations. According to him, the bird successfully learned and imitated the sound in the same frequency range in which it heard it, and effectively transmitted about 176 KB of uncompressed information.
«Hypothetically, if this were an audio file transfer protocol that uses a 10:1 data compression ratio, that’s almost 2 MB of information per second. While there are many caveats and limitations here, the fact that you can set up a speaker in your backyard and possibly store any amount of data in songbird recordings — is insane».
The experiment is amazing, even at times of its relative simplicity. How jokes Mark Tyson from Tom’s Hardware, launch of Doom on an ostrich is just around the corner.
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