If you think working from home is difficult, consider the spider, who lives at work in a house it built. Arachnids use their intricate webs to trap meals and navigate the structure using the vibrations it feels through the hairs on its legs.
Today, a team of researchers from MIT reports that they translated those vibrations into musical tones. What’s more, she raise the prospect of ever communicating with spiders, using their vibrating world as a medium for language.
The team presented their research today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. To find out the sounds of a spider’s web, they housed a spider in their lab and laser-scanned the web that constructed it in two-dimensional sections.
Spiders live in this vibrating universe … they live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can now acceptss, ”said co-author Markus Buehler, one material scientist at MIT, in a telephone conversation. “One of the things we can do with this approach with this instrument is that for the first time we can start to feel a bit like a spider or experience the world the way the spider does.”
Also a musician, Buehler regularly combines his knowledge of computational science with composition and makes music from processes in the natural world. The spider web project is bigger (literally) than his previous work, that aimed at 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 underway Buehler’s Soundcloud, and all paraphrase sounds that naturally play at vibrational frequencies beyond the capabilities of the human ear. Buehler and his ther of seven transpose them to our audible range. Artist Tomás Saraceno digitized the 3D webs, they turn into visualizations that change their real complexity.
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“Unlike a protein, where we have to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, a spider’s web follows Newtonian mechanics,” said Buehler. “We can use the same equations we use for a guitar string. The material properties are different, but essentially it’s the same equation for the vibration itself. “
Mapped in three dimensions, the spider web looks like it is spectral image of a nebulaThe team attributed specific sound frequencies to strands of the web, in the same way that the pitch of a guitar string rises as you shorten the string. They made their scans over the course of the web’s construction, shedding light on how the vibrations felt by the spider take on different tones and timbres over time.
They go a step further than producing the soundscape of the web. T.The team has created a virtual reality program in which a viewer plays the spider and can “pluck” any part of the web to hear how the sound resonates from it.
When playing on the Internet, the researchers isolated the sound coming from some of it. Otherwise, Buehler said, the sound would be cacophone to the human ear. Depending on your perspective, the spider web’s song may sound like a wind chime in the Twilight Zone or a bad attack of tinnitus. (I’ve never been close to Aragog or Shelob, but this sounds about as terrifying as I imagine a spider hole is).
It is not our native language, although it bears a resemblance to the beginning of Childish Gambino’s “Me and Your Mama.” The sounds are mean to a spider survive, as they can hear the impact of a prey on the web or feel the tap dance of a suitor.
The longer-term goal is to be able to communicate with a spider on a web, Buehler said. To begin that process, researchers will “play” the web in such a way that it elicits a response from the creator and resident. Later, mimicking another spider in conversation could pave the way for talking to the arachnids.
“Spiders are silent, and the web itself is also something you don’t associate with sound,” said Buehler. “We’re trying to give the spider a voice … so maybe one day we can chat with a spider, and maybe play a song together and jam together.”