- A Starling has recreated a digital image from sound hours after hearing
- Reconstruction of a PNG file using Birdsong raises more questions than it answers about Data Fidelity
- To require 2MB/s from a bird vocalization system extends credibility far beyond its natural limit
In a Bisarr, yet exciting experiment, musician and science enthusiast Benn Jordan has investigated whether birds could act as a living storage medium.
The bird in question, a young starling, had been rescued as a chicken and bred by people after apparently being abandoned near a noisy train track.
It turns out that such an early exposure made the starling unusually susceptible to sounds that are not typically found in nature – including reverb -tung speech and mechanical sounds.
Transform images into sound and then back again
Starling’s vocal learning skills were central to the experiment, which, unlike parrots, which was rejected for this test, has songbirds a complex vocal organ called a syrinx capable of much refined modulation.
Jordan thought this could make them ideal candidates for reproduction of complex sound wave forms.
His goal was to see if the bird could preserve and reproduce a sound -based version of an image – specifically a line drawing of a bird encoded as a sound wave shape.
The experiment involved the coding of a PNG image in a waveform using a spectral synthesizer.
Jordan repeatedly played this to the bird and tried to ‘upload’ the image to its memory.
While this may sound long -term, something unexpected happened during postalysis of the recorded sessions.
Mid -hour playback data emerged a well -known waveform – a looked like the original image – and it appeared later in the session after Jordan had stopped feeding the sound of the bird.
This suggests that Starling itself may have recreated the image wave form vocally.
Jordan estimated that the bird reproduced the signal in the same frequency range as it was originally coded, and transmitted roughly “176 kgyte uncompressed information.”
With the help of speculative math and assuming compression, he suggested that the bird could have provided data of about “2 megabytes per second.”
This speed exceeds typical DNA storage reading speeds, although it obviously lacks duration or reliability of more established media such as an external SSD or even a portable HDD.
While the experiment is undeniably creative, it invites skepticism.
Songbirds can mimic sounds, but equating it with consistent, structured data picking feels prematurely.
Unlike an SSD that offers quick and repeatable access to stored information, a starling cannot guarantee stable performance or detention.
Even if the bird hides the data how do you make them sing when you need the data? What about security? The bird can give the data to the one it finds appropriate.
The idea of using birds to keep digital data missing not only scalability but also controls – it can even literally fly away with your data.
Although Starling raised a sound similar to the coded image, it is whether this really constitutes data storage in any useful sense is not discussed.
At best, this unusual case offers a poetic cross between biology and calculation, and at worst, it is a fleeting curiosity that will unlikely to replace DNA storage, so much less your external HDD.
Via Tomshardware
