Unbelievable discovery: An individual digitally stored a picture on a living avian creature
In an intriguing experiment, musician and acoustic science YouTuber Benn Jordan has utilised European starlings as an unconventional data backup solution. By encoding digital data into sound and training the birds to mimic and store that sound in their vocal repertoire, Jordan has successfully demonstrated a live, biological form of data storage and retrieval.
The European starling, with its complex vocal organ known as the syrinx, is capable of producing multiple tones simultaneously, making it an ideal candidate for acoustic mimicry. Jordan built an ultrasonic microphone setup to record the bird’s vocalizations with high temporal resolution, which is essential because starlings perceive sound with finer timing sensitivity than humans. This setup also aided him in slowing down and analysing the encoded audio data produced by the bird in "bird time".
Jordan encoded a PNG image into audio signals using a spectral synthesizer, then taught a European starling to reproduce that encoded sound. When the starling sings back the sound, it effectively plays back the stored digital data. Remarkably, the starling successfully learned and emulated the sound, effectively transferring about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information.
This approach is largely experimental and impractical as a mainstream backup solution but serves as a fascinating demonstration of the intersection of biology, acoustics, and digital data encoding. If this were an audible file transfer protocol with a 10:1 data compression ratio, that's nearly 2 megabytes of information per second.
While saving data to songbirds may not be the most efficient storage solution, it is now theoretically possible. This groundbreaking experiment is a testament to the creativity and innovation in the field of data storage and could pave the way for future, unconventional solutions.
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Background Information Lincoln Carpenter, a game writer with 11 years of experience, joined PC Gamer as a full-time News Writer in 2024.
- The success of encoding data into the vocal repertoire of European starlings brings to light the potential for unusual data storage methods similar to the use of unconventional gaming headsets like the HyperX Cloud Alpha for improved audio quality during gameplay.
- With digital data storage reaching unprecedented limits, one might consider the possibility of surpassing these limitations by mimicking nature and recording data like seasons of popular games onto starlings, akin to the recording of songs or music episodes on a media player.
- As scientific advancements continue to uncover the complexities of technology and nature, imaginative applications like the use of European starlings as data storage devices and the development of high-fidelity wireless gaming headsets, such as the Audeze Maxwell, blur the lines between the realms of science and technology.
