Flock Storage: Audio Boffin Encodes Data In A Starling

Forget flash storage – flock storage is here after it was demonstrated that data can be saved to a bird.

Proof that birds can be used to store data was uploaded to YouTube by Benn Jordan, a musician and researcher, who, during the half-hour video, encoded a drawing of a bird into sound via a spectral synthesizer, and persuaded a starling to add that sound to its vocabulary. The bird did so (among other sounds) and sang it back to Jordan, effectively demonstrating storage and playback.

“Starlings can do something… phenomenal,” said Jordan. “They can effectively record and replay nearly any sound that they hear.”

Jordan was working on a project about analyzing bird songs when he came across a Starling named “The Mouth”, rescued and cared for by artist and animal rescuer, Sarah Tidwell.

“The Mouth” appeared to be capable of learning sounds and singing them with remarkable accuracy. Noting that other birds in the same order can detect light pattern changes above 150 Hz, Jordan said: “Temporal resolution is also very important when we consider starling songs. The higher resolution means that the seconds last much longer to a starling.”

The upshot is that any imperfections are much more noticeable in what you might call bird time. “This is exactly why we’re using special ultrasonic microphones… so we can slow things down.”

Jordan told The Register: “I’ve worked with ‘sound drawing’ for music and sound design for decades, so that aspect of the experiment was almost an afterthought that I quickly did.”

The sound representation of Jordan’s drawing was played to the starling a few times. But while the bird appeared to be paying attention, Jordan said in the video, “we didn’t hear him clone it or sing it.”

Back at his computer, Jordan went through the gigabytes of sounds recorded during the session and spotted what looked like a bird-shaped figure in the spectrogram. It had been combined with another type of vocalization, but the drawing was definitely there.

Unbeknownst to the humans, the bird was more than just paying attention. The Register asked how quickly the sound was added to the bird’s vocabularly. “Instantly!” replied Jordan. “I played it maybe 5 times as I truly didn’t expect him to pick it up unless he was exposed to it routinely and thought it was another bird living in his environment.”

“We lost a little bit of precision in the starling song, and he was about 50 to 60 Hz flat,” said Jordan in the video. “Musically, that means literally nothing up in the 4,000 Hz range.”

“This little bird successfully learned and emulated the sound in the exact same frequency range that he heard it, effectively transferring about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information.”

It’s a neat demonstration of what a starling is capable of. “While there are a lot of caveats and limitations there,” Jordan went on, “the fact that you could set up a speaker in your yard and conceivably store any amount of data in song birds is crazy.”

We asked Jordan if there might be more attempts in the future. “I suppose if I were to try again, I’d use FT8 signals, which are used in amateur radio and designed to transmit data with the imperfections of analog signals.

“But I also want to be candid and say that birds are an awful vector for data transmission, as is any living thing due to the many unpredictable variables at odds with how we store binary data.

That said, “It was a cool magic trick to get my viewers to learn about birds, and hopefully inspire some of them to learn more and contribute to the ornithology community.”

But can you play Doom on a pigeon? ®

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