Aw, get a tiny piezo speaker instead. We don't use frog's legs as activators any more, since Galvani.

Yuck.

Torturing insects to make worse-than-MIDI music is gross.

Like, I dunno, record lots of cicada sounds and SIMULATE it?

These researchers should be ashamed of themselves. And it wasn't other-life-saving reasons, but shitty music.

Horrors beyond human comprehension, got it. We know that arthropods can meaningfully feel pain. Turning living insects into a biological Floppotron is some Dr. Moreau shit that will earn you, at best, an IgNobel -- and I'm not even sure the IgNobel committee would want to draw positive attention to this kind of work. That said, I'm sure that The Fifth Element style spy cockroaches will start appearing in homes and offices courtesy your local intelligence agency before the decade is out.

The bigger tragedy here is choosing Pachelbel's Canon.

Direct YouTube link here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p49K0L2fSig

Another thought: it seems to me not out of the ordinary that with access to our own brains, someone could literally "play them like a fiddle". This suggests that we should start to enact laws that decision making politicians should be required to be air-gapped.

Many seem worried about the safety of the insects. An author responded as mentioned in the article.

> The experiments did not harm the cicadas, co-author Naoto Nishida, now at the University of Tokyo, told New Scientist. "Some of them wanted to run away," he said. "Others were like, 'OK, use my abdomen.'"

I don't understand the "emergency warning" use case.