Spiders rely quite a bit on touch to sense the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered with tiny hairs and crevices that can distinguish between different types of vibrations.
A prey crashing into a web makes a completely different vibratory sound, for example, another spider is approaching, or the stirring of a breeze. Each strand of a web produces a different tone.
A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of a spider’s web into music, in collaboration with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive musical instrument entitled Spider’s CanvasNow the team has refined and built on that previous work, adding an interactive virtual reality component to enable people to access and interact with the web.
This research, the team says, will not only help them better understand the three-dimensional architecture of a spider web, but it may even help us learn the vibrational language of spiders.
“The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings,” says MIT engineer Markus Buehler. “They don’t see very well, so they feel their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.”
When you think of a spider web, you probably think of the web of a globe weaver: flat, round, with radial spokes around which the spider constructs a spiral net. However, most spider webs are not of this kind, but built in three dimensions, such as cloth webs, clew webs and funnel webs.
To investigate the structure of these webs, the team housed a tropical tent web spider (Cyrtophora citricola) in a rectangular housing, and waited for it to fill the room with a three-dimensional web. They then used a plate laser to illuminate and create high-definition images of 2D sections of the web.
A specially developed algorithm then compiled the 3D architecture of the web from these 2D cross-sections. To convert this into music, different sound frequencies were assigned to different strings. The notes thus generated were played in patterns based on the structure of the web.
They also scanned a web as it was spinning and turned 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 the construction of the web; Having documented the step-by-step process also helps us understand how spiders build a 3D web without supporting structures – a skill that can be used, for example, for 3D printing.
Spider’s Canvas allowed the audience to hear the spider music, but the virtual reality, in which users can enter and play parts of the web themselves, adds a whole new layer of experience, the researchers said.
“The virtual reality environment is really intriguing because your ears will pick up structural features that you might see but don’t recognize right away,” explains Buehler.
“By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really understand the environment in which the spider lives.”
This VR environment, with realistic web physics, allows researchers to understand what happens when they also mess with parts of the web. Stretch a strand and the tone changes. Break one and see how that affects the other strands around it. This, too, can help us understand the architecture of a spider’s web and why they are built the way they are.
And, perhaps most fascinatingly, the work allowed the team to develop an algorithm to identify the types of vibrations of a spider web, translate them into “captured prey,” or “web under construction,” or ” another spider has arrived with amorous intent. ”. This, the team said, is the basis for the development of learning to speak spider – at least, tropical tent web spider.
“Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to actually speak the spider’s language,” Buehler said.
“If we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we influence what they do and start communicating with them? Those are really exciting ideas.”
The team presented their work at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. Their previous research appeared in the 2018 Journal of the Royal Society Interface