Bird law in this country is not governed by reason.
Now, if we figure out how to convince the birds it's a predator distress call (which, if you think about it, it kind of is), we can probably get it to persist across generations.
If you watch some of the other vids it does a perfect r2d2 impression, don't recall if it did it in Benn's.
You can also see his modular setup in the background.
I didn't know of him until today. Instantly, a new inspiration.
It's not obvious at all that birds are able to reproduce multiplexed frequency-keyed streams with enough precisions to draw freaking pictures in spectrum analyzer graphs.
Humans can barely control their voices to nail one frequency. Badly.
These birds are capable of reproducing the output of several sound sources producing sounds at once, with near-perfect time and frequency precision.
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I Can Run Doom On A Bird
That's essentially what he has done. Except he did the modulation/demodulation with audio software (and, technically, stored a monochrome bitmap, not a PNG).
Dial-up modems encode data in audio-frequency. Later modems used phase-shift keying¹, but the very early ones used frequency-shift keying², which is essentially encoding data in a frequency graph - i.e., drawing a line in a spectrum analyzer.
Drawing a bird in a spectrum analyzer is packing much more data than that; it's like playing several of those streams at once.
The bird has shown itself to be capable of remembering and reproducing multiplexed frequency-keyed streams.
>With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.
Literally a point made in the video³ at 18:34.
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¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-shift_keying
It's a decent Fermi estimate¹ :)
We also don't know how many songs we can get the bird to memorize for us.
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Thinking about it in reverse, how much data would it take to encode 1 second of birdsong in the most efficient audio codec I can imagine. If M4A or MP3 with the bitrate slammed way down isn't a fair comparison, then some birdsong-specific ML autoencoder... Probably 500 bytes? Would still be enough for a Twitter tweet.
A tweet within a tweet!
The product recommendations at the end are gold too! A 'hacker' spirit there.
In terms of signal length, can you store the images/data in a flock of birds too? I wonder what the RAID set-up of a flock of starlings is like? I'm thinking something like the Tines in Fire Upon the Deep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
More crazily, can you get these data signals to be Turing complete? I know that not really what data is like in a vocalization pattern, but can you manage to get the birds' vocalizations to do logic of some sort and change patterns in more than a non-entropic way?
Crazy cool stuff!
There could even be multiple carriers in the signal.
It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
The video shows the bird capable of remembering and reproducing 5-10 frequency graphs simultaneously (which you'd need to draw a picture), so you can multiplex those.
> There could even be multiple carriers in the signal.
Or same carrier, but different sets of frequency keys for each stream.
> It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
Maybe they do, someone should ping Ben to test that :D
Among other things, he also covers (lightly) bird vocal anatomy, audio "cameras", birding apps & equipment.
..got the bird to mimic that sound with enough precision for the image to be clearly recognizable in the spectogram of the recording.
In fact, he didn't notice when the bird did it; he just stumbled into the picture he drew in the spectrum when looking at the data.
Seems like a cool idea based on the comments here though.
ranger_danger•6h ago
justincormack•5h ago
frollogaston•3h ago