Listen to the music of the spider’s web. Tell me what you hear?

(Reuters) – It’s a strange, foreboding and reverberating song, enough to send a tingle to your spine.

That’s what a spider’s web sounds like.

From communication to construction, spider webs can provide an orchestra of information, says Markus Buehler, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who used artificial intelligence to study them.

“Spiders use vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment, with other spiders,” he said. “We recorded these vibrations from spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibrational patterns and associate them with certain actions, practically learning the language of the spider.”

Buehler and his team of researchers created 3D models of spider webs when arachnids did different things – such as construction, repair, hunting, and feeding. Then they listened to the patterns in the spider signals and recreated the sounds using computers and mathematical algorithms.

“Spiders are a completely different animal,” Buehler said. “What they see or feel is not actually audible or visible to the human eye or the human ear. Therefore, by transposing it, we begin to experience this. “

Buehler hopes his team’s work could allow people to understand a spider’s language and one day communicate with them.

“Songs are really the kind of relationships that the spider would experience. And so we can start to feel a little bit like a spider this way, ”Buehler said.

There are more than 47,000 species of spiders and all silk webs rotate to provide shelter and food. Scientists say that the silk on a spider is five times stronger than steel.

The living structure of a spider’s web could lead to innovations in construction, maintenance and repairs, Buehler said.

“We can imagine creating a synthetic system that mimics what the spider does by detecting the web, repairing the web,” he said.