If you think that working from home is hard, consider the spider, who lives at work in a house he built. Arachnids use their intricate webs to catch tables, navigating the structure using the vibrations they feel through the hairs on their legs.
Today, a team of researchers at MIT reports that they have translated these vibrations into musical tones. Moreover, they raise the prospect of one day communicating with spiders, using their vibrational world as a means of language.
The team presented its research today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. To find out the sounds of a spider’s web, they hosted a spider in their lab and laser-scanned the web they built into two-dimensional sections.
“Spiders live in this vibrational universe … they live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can now accessss ”, said the co-author of the paper, Markus Buehler, a materials scientist at MIT, in a phone call. “One of the things we can do with this tool through this approach is that we can, for the first time, start to feel a little like a spider or experience the world the way a spider does.”
Also a musician, Buehler regularly combines his computer skills science with composition and makes music from the processes of the natural world. The spider web project is bigger (literally) than his previous work, which focused on translating proteins into musical compositions. A recent project translated a key protein of the new coronavirus into sound. Many of these musical interpretations of the world are on The sound of Buehlerand all paraphrased sounds that play naturally at vibrational frequencies beyond the capabilities of the human ear. Buehler and ther out of seven transpose them into our sound range. Artist Tomás Saraceno digitized 3D websites, turning them into visualizations that reveal them the real complexity.
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“Unlike a protein, in which we have to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, a spider’s web follows Newtonian mechanics,” Buehler said. “We can use the same equations we use for a guitar string. The properties of the material are different, but it is essentially the same equation for the vibration itself. ”
Placed in three dimensions, the spider’s web looks like a spectral one the image of a nebula. The team assigned specific sound frequencies to some threads on the web, in the same way that the tone of a guitar string will increase the shorter the string. They did their scans during the construction of the canvas, shedding light on how the vibrations that the spider feels take on different tones and timbres over time.
They take a step beyond producing the soundscape of the web. Tthe team produced a virtual reality program in which a spectator plays the spider and is able to “snatch” any component of the web to hear how the sound resonates in it.
When playing on the web, researchers would isolate the sound from part of it. Otherwise, Buehler said, the sound would be cacophonous to the human ear. Depending on your perspective, the spider web song may sound like wind sounds in Twilight area or a bad tinnitus crisis. (I’ve never been in the immediate vicinity of Aragog or Shelob, but this sounds as terrifying as I imagine it to be a spider’s den).
It’s not our native musical language, although it bears a resemblance to the beginning of Childish Gambino’s “Me and Your Mother.” For a spider, sounds mean survival because they can hear the impact of prey on the web or feel the tap dance of a suitor.
The longer-term aspiration is to be able to communicate with a spider on a canvas, Buehler said. To begin this process, researchers will “play” the Internet in a way that receives a response from the creator and his resident. Later, imitating another spider in conversation could pave the way for discussion with arachnids.
“Spiders are silent, and the network itself is also something that is not associated with sound,” Buehler said. “We’re trying to give the spider a voice … so that one day we can have a little chat with a spider and maybe sing a song together and mingle together.”