(Reuters) – It’s a creepy, ominous, echoing tune, enough to send a tingle down your spine.
This is what a spider 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 has 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 of spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibrational patterns and associate them with certain actions, basically learning the language of the spider.”
Buehler and his team of researchers created 3D models of spider webs when the arachnids did a variety of things – like build, repair, hunt, and feed. Then they listened for patterns in the spin signals and created the sounds using computers and mathematical algorithms.
“Spiders are a completely different animal,” said Buehler. “What they see or feel is not really audible or visible to the human eye or ear. And so by transposing it, we begin to experience that. “
Buehler hopes his team’s work will enable people to understand a spider’s language and communicate with them one day.
“The melodies are really the kind of relationships that the spider would also experience. And so we can start to feel a bit like a spider that way, ”said Buehler.
There are over 47,000 spider species, and they all spin silk webs to provide housing and catch food. Scientists say the silk of a spider web is five times stronger than steel.
The living structure of a spider web could lead to innovations in construction, maintenance and repair, Buehler said.
“We can imagine creating a synthetic system that would mimic what the spider does in observing the web, repairing the web,” he said.
Reporting by Angela Moore; Editing by Karishma Singh