A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.
Imagine the possibilities for piracy and secure messaging (provided that the birds don’t snitch on you).
The image 💀
2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.
Reducing Benn Jordan down to just “enthusiast” is wild.
Musician/Wizard/Activist
The breadth of capability this guy has is insane to me. Almost every time I watch one of his videos I find that he’s managed to basically gain a new field of expertise. It’s really impressive.
Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.
Latency tho…
Quick, someone teach it the soundtrack to Doom
Can you run Doom on it tho?
Asking the REAL question
Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” just got a whole lot worse.
Can you store “The Birds” on the birds?
Haha, made you say cock
A hole lot worse.
The Trent Reznor version please.
Well of course NSA’s spy device can store information. We’ve known this for decades
Not to be a wet blanket, but every time this comes up I get annoyed by some factual inaccuracies in the articles about this. It is not digital! He drew an image on a computer, but converted it to an analogue spectrogram to store on the bird. That’s neat as hell, but it’s not digital. The image that he got back was slightly corrupted.
Now I would be fascinated to see a follow-up seeing if you can actually modulate a digital signal and have is survive a round trip through the bird bit-for-bit accurate. I suspect in reality it would be much lower data rate, but definitely not nothing!
By your definition nothing can be digital since the world is analog. Even the bits in your CPU are voltages in transistors. As such, every real life signal can be distorted.
Hmm, not so sure. He produced a digital signal, who’s spectrogram happened to be an image, and then played that digital signal to a bird. Dunno if a analogue spectrogram really even makes sense as a concept. The only analogue part of the chain would be the birds vocalisations, right?
The whole sequence is:
- Digitally synthesized spectrogram (lossless)
- Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
- Heard by the bird (analogue, lossy)
- Reproduced by the bird (analogue, lossy)
- Captured by an ADC as a digital audio signal (lossy)
- Spectrum-analysed to observe a similar (but corrupted) reproduction of the shape in the original spectrogram
To be transferring digital information, we would instead need to modulate and demodulate the digital signal (exactly like an old modem) so that the analogue corruption does not affect the digital signal:
- Image file (lossless)
- Bit stream (lossless)
- Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
- Heard by the bird (lossy)
- Reproduced by the bird (lossy)
- Demodulated to recover exact bit stream despite distortion (lossless again)
- Decode bit stream to recover original image file, bit-for-bit perfect
I extremely doubt that this bird is capable of 2MB/s. For reference that would make it 280+ times fast than dialup, and barely slower than ADSL. This setup is basically just using the bird instead of a telephone line.
- Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
- Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
These steps are literally the same thing. You’re converting some data into sound for the bird to hear.
Edit: Actually, most physical modulation schemes use sinusoids anyways. So that’s exactly the same as playing a spectrum.
Yes, the near-identical sentences (only drawing a distinction between the processes where one exists) would indicate that. The “heard by the bird” and “reproduced by the bird” steps were also the same. But this is necessary context to make clear the digital data (“bit-stream”) that is being modulated into the signal.
It is far from “exactly the same”. The similarity is only in that both go through the same analogue channel. The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly, while the spectrogram cannot.
The article title says they converted a PNG and the bird was able to “recall the file”, and yet it produced an indisputably different file. That it looks vaguely the same to the cursory human observer does not make it the same file.
The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly,
But this isn’t true. Just because a signal is modulated doesn’t mean it can’t be distorted.
A spectrogram is just showing that arbitrary data can be sent though this channel. It’s literally a form of modulation.
I suppose you have caught me out slightly lacking in precision or pedantry. A digital to analogue modulation scheme is able to exactly reconstruct the original digital signal within the design tolerances for noise and distortion. Yes, eventually a signal may degrade or be corrupted, but prior to that point the reproduction is literally and exactly perfect. That exactitude is just about the definition of a digital system. This bird system is incapable of reproducing the input image of the bird exactly. It is not a digital communication system, unless you consider the “PNG” of the bird to have not been the message being carried.
I thought we were being pedantic here?
Yes, eventually a signal may degrade or be corrupted, but prior to that point the reproduction is literally and exactly perfect.
Modulation schemes are characterized via a probabilistic tolerance, so even when you are within the tolerances, you can get an incorrect value at some expected rate. Note that you can even define a modulation scheme with a high error rate and be ok with that.
That’s why I take issue with the concept of an exactly perfect reproduction. Usually there are layers above the digital modulation to handle these possibility to decrease the error rates even lower.
And no, I don’t consider the PNG to be the data carried. I think the way the author does the bandwidth calculations is incorrect.
Data on a bird ? This will convince people about birds being drones more now.
Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!
They’re just covering up the truth of the time cube
back to carrier pigeons?
Birds are the OG text device. Tie a little note and send them on their way.
One famous example is Cher Ami, a pigeon who delivered a message that saved a group of surrounded American soldiers during WW1.
Edit: WW1 and WW3 /s
What if I have bird blindness and I try and teach it to a duck?
Ducks? That’s quackery.
I want this to be the next reveal in a movie or TV series, in the same fashion as the one of the Navajo “backing up” the Smoking Man’s magnetic tape in The X-Files.
So a moving target of data you cant reliably recall and might get shot by someone looking for food. At least its neat though.
B I R D S A R E N T R E A L
Yep, obviously a government funded drone if it only has 2Mb uplink
