Spiders rely quite significantly on touch to feel the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered with small hairs and slits that can distinguish between different types of vibrations.
The error of the prey in a canvas produces a very different vibrational clamor from that of another spider coming, or the shaking of a breeze, for example. Each thread of a web produces a different tone.
A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of the spider web into music, collaborating with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive musical instrument called Spider web. Now the team has refined and built on that previous work and added an interactive virtual reality component to allow people to enter and interact with the web.
This research, the team says, will not only help them better understand the three-dimensional architecture of the spider’s web, but may even help us learn the vibrational language of spiders.
“The spider lives in a vibrant string environment,” said MIT engineer Markus Buehler. “I don’t see very well, so I feel my world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.”
When you think of a spider’s web, you most likely think of a globe-woven web: flat, round, with radial spokes around which the spider builds a spiral net. Most spider webs, however, are not of this kind, but built in three sizes – such as sheet cloths, tangle cloths, and funnel cloths, for example.
To explore the structure of these types of sails, the team hosted a tropical tent canvas spider (Cyrtophora citricola) in a rectangular enclosure and waited for it to fill the space with a three-dimensional strip. Then they used a sheet laser to illuminate and create high definition images of 2D cross sections of the internet.
A specially developed algorithm then created the 3D architecture of the web from these 2D cross sections. To turn this into music, different sound frequencies were assigned to different threads. The notes thus generated were rendered in models based on the web structure.
They also scanned a network while it was spinning, translating every step of the process into music. This means that the notes change as the structure of the web changes, and the listener can hear the process of building the web; Having a step-by-step record means we can better understand how spiders build a 3D network without support structures – a skill that could be used for 3D printing, for example.
Spider web they allowed the audience to hear spider music, but virtual reality, which users can enter and play on their own on the web, adds a new level of experience, the researchers said.
“The virtual reality environment is really interesting, because your ears will pick up structural features that you might see, but not immediately recognize,” Buehler explained.
“By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really begin to understand the environment in which the spider lives.”
This VR environment, with a realistic web physics, allows researchers to understand what happens when they get confused with certain parts of the web. Stretch a thread, and its tone changes. Break one and see how it affects the other threads around it. And this can help us understand the architecture of the spider web and why they are built the way they are.
And, perhaps most fascinatingly, the paper allowed the team to develop an algorithm to identify the types of vibrations of the spider’s web, translating them into “caught prey” or “canvas under construction” or “another spider arrived with love intent.” “This, the team said, is the basis for developing spider speech learning – at least the tropical tent cloth spider.
“Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to practically speak the spider’s language,” Buehler said.
“If we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we affect what they do and start communicating with them? These are really exciting ideas.”
The team presented their work at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. Their previous research was published in 2018 in Royal Society Interface Journal.