Soon at a nearby music venue.
Amanda Kooser / CNET
Spiders don’t see well, so they feel the world through the vibrations that creep through their intricate webs as they stretch silk threads or blow a breeze. It seems that these vibrations make for a music from another world.
We know this because of the work of MIT scientists who sonicated the 3D structure of spider webs and shared the results online. You can listen to their spider soundtrack in the video below.
“It sounds like two things: 1. A slowed-down version of the dial-up sound. 2. A Yoko Ono composition,” a YouTube commenter said in response to the video.
The researchers, led by Markus Buehler, an MIT engineering professor and experimental music composer, presented the results of their work Monday at the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting.
The team scanned a laser spider web during the construction of the natural structure, assigning different frequencies to the canvas threads to create “notes” that they combined into models based on the 3D shape of the canvas. Together, those notes generated songs, which the researchers then played using an original harplike instrument. As far as I know, the compositions have not yet been sold as NFT.
Buehler has long been interested in obtaining sound from biological materials as another way of understanding the science and mathematics behind them. Previously, he put music on the coronavirus.
A better understanding of how spiders build their webs step by step could lead to 3D printers that “mimic the spider” that build complex microelectronics, Buehler hopes. “The spider’s ‘printing’ is remarkable because it does not use backing material, as is often required in current 3D printing methods,” he said in a statement.
But the team also hopes the research could help people communicate with spiders in their own language through synthetic signals. Scientists recorded vibrations produced when spiders engaged in activities such as spinning the canvas and communicating with other spiders, including through yard signals. An machine learning algorithm classified these sounds according to activities.
I just want to know when I can get tickets to see a spider in concert.