- A Starling has recreated a digital image of Sound Hours after listening to it
- The reconstruction of a PNG file using Birdsong raises more questions than you answer about data loyalty
- Claim 2 mb/s of a bird vocalization system stretches credibility far beyond its natural limit
In a strange but intriguing experiment, the musician and science enthusiast Benn Jordan has explored whether birds could act as a living medium.
The bird in question, a young Starling, had been rescued as a girl and raised by humans after apparently being abandoned near a noisy train track.
As a result, such an early exposure made the sterling unusually receptive to sounds that are not typically found in nature, including heavy discourse of reverberation and mechanical noises.
Turning the images into sound, then returns again
Starling’s vocal learning skills were fundamental to the experiment, since unlike parrots, which were fired for this trial, singing birds have a complex vocal organ called Syrinx, capable of a highly refined modulation.
Jordan believed that this could turn them into ideal candidates to reproduce complex audio waveforms.
Its objective was to see if the bird could retain and reproduce a version based on the sound of an image, specifically, a line drawing of a coded bird as an audio waveform.
The experiment involved coding a PNG image in a waveform using a spectral synthesizer.
Jordan played the bird repeatedly, trying to ‘load’ the image in his memory.
While this may sound crazy, something unexpected happened during the subsequent analysis of the recorded sessions.
In the midst of reproduction data hours, a family waveform arose, one that resembles the original image, and later appeared in the session, after Jordan had stopped feeding the sound to the bird.
This suggests that the Starling itself may have recreated the waveform of the image vocally.
Jordan estimated that the bird reproduced the signal in the same frequency range in which it was originally encoded, transferring approximately “176 kilobytes of uncompressed information.”
Using speculative mathematics and assuming compression, he suggested that the bird could have delivered data in around “2 megabytes per second.”
That rate exceeds the typical DNA storage reading speeds, although obviously it lacks the permanence or reliability of the most established means such as an external SSD or even a portable HDD.
While the experiment is undeniably creative, invites skepticism.
The singing birds can imitate sounds, but equate it with the recovery of consistent and structured data feels premature.
Unlike a SSD, which offers quick and repeatable access to stored information, a Starling cannot guarantee stable performance or retention.
Even if the bird stores the data, how do you sing when you need the data? What about security? The bird can give the data to whoever considers it convenient.
The idea of using birds to maintain digital data not only scalability but also control, it can even literally fly with your data.
Although the Starling reproduced a sound that resembles the coded image, if this really constitutes data storage in any usable sense remains debatable.
In the best case, this unusual case offers a poetic intersection of biology and calculation and, in the worst, it is a fleeting curiosity that is unlikely to replace the storage of DNA, and much less its external HDD.
Via Tomshardware
