- A starfish has recreated a digital image from its hours after hearing it
- Reconstruct a PNG file using Birdsong raises more questions than they answer about data loyalty
- Claim 2 MB / s from a bird vocalization system extends credibility far beyond its natural limit
In a bizarre but intriguing experience, the musician and passionate about science Benn Jordan explored if birds could act as a living storage medium.
The bird in question, a young starling, had been rescued as a chick and raised by humans after having apparently been abandoned near a noisy railway.
It turns out that such early exposure has made the starling unusually receptive to sounds that are generally not found in nature – including heavy speech and mechanical noises.
Transform the images into a sound, then come back
The starling’s vocal learning capacities were at the heart of the experience, as unlike parrots, which were rejected for this trial, singing birds have a complex vocal organ called Syrinx, capable of very refined modulation.
Jordan thought it could make ideal candidates to reproduce complex audio wave waves.
Its objective was to see if the bird could keep and reproduce a version based on an image – in particular, a line drawing of a bird coded like an audio wave form.
The experience involved code a PNG image in a wave form using a spectral synthesizer.
Jordan has played this on the bird several times, trying to “download” the image in his memory.
Although it may seem eccentric, something unexpected happened during the post-analysis of the recorded sessions.
In the midst of hours of reading data, a familiar wave form has emerged – a resemblance of the original image – and it appeared later in the session, after Jordan ceased to nourish the sound to the bird.
This suggests that the starling himself may have recreated the form of vocally image wave.
Jordan estimated that the bird has reproduced the signal in the same range of frequencies in which it was originally coded, transferring roughly “176 kilobbytes of uncompressed information”.
Using speculative mathematics and assuming compression, he suggested that the bird may have provided data to approximately “2 megaoctes per second”.
This rate exceeds the typical DNA storage storage speed speeds, but obviously does not have the permanence or reliability of more established supports such as an external SSD or even a portable hard drive.
Although experience is undeniably creative, it invites skepticism.
The singing birds can imitate sounds, but by assimilating this to a coherent and structured recovery of data seems premature.
Unlike an SSD, which provides rapid and reproducible access to stored information, a starling cannot guarantee stable performance or retention.
Even if the bird stores the data, how to make it sing when you need the data? What about security? The bird can give the data to which it will judge well.
The idea of using birds to maintain digital data not only lacks scalability, but also to control – it can even literally fly with your data.
Although the Starling has reproduced a sound similar to the coded image, if it really constitutes data storage in a usable direction remains questionable.
At best, this unusual case offers a poetic intersection of biology and calculation and at worst, it is an ephemeral curiosity, it is unlikely that it replaces DNA storage, not to mention your external hard drive.
Via Tomshardware
