I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back. I think with the right format it should be possible to do that. With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.
alterom · 18h ago
>I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back.
That's essentially what he has done. Except he did the modulation/demodulation with audio software (and, technically, stored a monochrome bitmap, not a PNG).
Dial-up modems encode data in audio-frequency. Later modems used phase-shift keying¹, but the very early ones used frequency-shift keying², which is essentially encoding data in a frequency graph - i.e., drawing a line in a spectrum analyzer.
Drawing a bird in a spectrum analyzer is packing much more data than that; it's like playing several of those streams at once.
The bird has shown itself to be capable of remembering and reproducing multiplexed frequency-keyed streams.
>With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.
It's analog though. Presumably the shape of the image matters, like horizontal lines are easier than vertical, it's not just a bitmap. He made the point of how many KB you can store in the song, but is it right? There are different conceivable ways to store binary data in that. I have no idea how efficient it'd be to get something 99% reliable.
alterom · 17h ago
> He made the point of how many KB you can store in the song, but is it right?
It's a decent Fermi estimate¹ :)
We also don't know how many songs we can get the bird to memorize for us.
He said 176KB of entropy in that 1-second birdsong, which doesn't seem close. That's more than the bitrate of a typical M4A, for a much simpler sound.
Thinking about it in reverse, how much data would it take to encode 1 second of birdsong in the most efficient audio codec I can imagine. If M4A or MP3 with the bitrate slammed way down isn't a fair comparison, then some birdsong-specific ML autoencoder... Probably 500 bytes? Would still be enough for a Twitter tweet.
alterom · 17h ago
> Would still be enough for a Twitter tweet.
A tweet within a tweet!
SequoiaHope · 6h ago
Inspired by the video I vibe coded up an application that lets you encode data in FSK and read the data bits back from a noisy recording. I think it would be fascinating for someone to try this!
https://github.com/sequoia-hope/starling
busymom0 · 19h ago
Next Video:
I Can Run Doom On A Bird
nurettin · 18h ago
European Starlings can imitate most doom sound effects.
Balgair · 14h ago
Thank you.
Literally made me laugh out loud.
raphman · 16h ago
"A Flock of Pigeons is Turing-Complete"
Balgair · 19h ago
Amazing!
The product recommendations at the end are gold too! A 'hacker' spirit there.
In terms of signal length, can you store the images/data in a flock of birds too? I wonder what the RAID set-up of a flock of starlings is like? I'm thinking something like the Tines in Fire Upon the Deep
More crazily, can you get these data signals to be Turing complete? I know that not really what data is like in a vocalization pattern, but can you manage to get the birds' vocalizations to do logic of some sort and change patterns in more than a non-entropic way?
Crazy cool stuff!
data-ottawa · 15h ago
Let's try a light weight Blockchain on a swarm of starlings.
CobrastanJorji · 20h ago
What a ride. I kept waiting for the punchline to be something dumb, like "we fed a USB drive to a bird" or "we tied a recording to a bird," and then when I realized what they were gonna do, I was shocked. It should have been obvious, but it was very clever! Really cool.
alterom · 18h ago
>It should have been obvious
It's not obvious at all that birds are able to reproduce multiplexed frequency-keyed streams with enough precisions to draw freaking pictures in spectrum analyzer graphs.
Humans can barely control their voices to nail one frequency. Badly.
These birds are capable of reproducing the output of several sound sources producing sounds at once, with near-perfect time and frequency precision.
cluckindan · 15h ago
They even reproduce the reverb of the space they’re in when they hear sounds.
coreyh14444 · 1h ago
Yeah, I also appreciate that I hadn't heard of this Youtubber before and I couldn't tell if he was a sound engineer who happened to make a video about birds or a bird guy who was playing with sound. Seems like both!
m-hodges · 20h ago
Having some hilarious thoughts about copyright.
Bird law in this country is not governed by reason.
Oooh now I wonder if I got the idea through subliminal message.
alterom · 18h ago
The video shows that there are many ways to do that :)
Now, if we figure out how to convince the birds it's a predator distress call (which, if you think about it, it kind of is), we can probably get it to persist across generations.
woodrowbarlow · 17h ago
this is what i've been wondering. is it feasible for a single diligent person to embed a message in an entire population of birds, in a manner that will persist generations? that's what i'd call a pretty good prank.
alterom · 17h ago
Talk about Easter eggs!
strangattractor · 20h ago
Ben's content is amazing in general. He has also built an sound camera and showed how to watermark recordings to confuse AI. Keep it up Ben!!
anton-c · 20h ago
Just watched this last night. That bird "the mouth" is beautiful and incredible. Love Benn Jordan's insane content.
If you watch some of the other vids it does a perfect r2d2 impression, don't recall if it did it in Benn's.
schindlabua · 19h ago
Also he's literally The Flashbulb of 2000s IDM fame. Some people are really just good at everything.
alterom · 18h ago
At some time in the video he's casually played a groove on the piano to back the birds for a couple of second, then stopped ("Wait, what am I doing") :)
You can also see his modular setup in the background.
I didn't know of him until today. Instantly, a new inspiration.
hoherd · 7h ago
He has a great video where he goes through a bunch of different software that Aphex Twin used over the years. https://youtu.be/5wIOBBodoic
any1 · 19h ago
Drawing into the spectrogram is a fun trick. I would really like to know how much data you can store in that bird using some digital modulation method such as FSK (frequency shift keying).
There could even be multiple carriers in the signal.
It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
> I would really like to know how much data you can store in that bird using some digital modulation method such as FSK (frequency shift keying).
The video shows the bird capable of remembering and reproducing 5-10 frequency graphs simultaneously (which you'd need to draw a picture), so you can multiplex those.
> There could even be multiple carriers in the signal.
Or same carrier, but different sets of frequency keys for each stream.
> It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
Maybe they do, someone should ping Ben to test that :D
The video covers a wide range of topics related to birds and audio. The title topic is actually only a small segment of the whole video, arguably not the most interesting one!
Among other things, he also covers (lightly) bird vocal anatomy, audio "cameras", birding apps & equipment.
haunter · 13h ago
I hate modern Youtube that now every single "serious" topic video is +30 mins length. 10 years ago we were perfectly fine with 10 mins stuff but of course algorithms and advertising and nowadays most Youtuber is pushing longer and longer videos as if we are watching peak evening television reporting...
flysand7 · 17h ago
Watched this video yesterday, and damn, it's really delightful watching experts make content about things they are passionate about. This love and passion is contageous, and even me, who up to this point knew almost nothing about birds has gained a new appreciation and love for these creatures. The fact that they can copy sounds is kinda incredible, and makes me want to listen more to them singing.
jonny_eh · 19h ago
We need a new RFC
alterom · 18h ago
RFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers, 1990)¹ needs a 2025 update :D
Fun (?) fact - with this protocol you could use a trained Hawk as a firewall.
alterom · 17h ago
Definitely a fun fact :D
bigbuppo · 19h ago
Seriously. Major security implications here as there's a potential for replay attacks.
isege · 19h ago
lmao
kyrofa · 16h ago
Wow, my worlds are colliding right now-- although seeing Benn on HN in retrospect shouldn't be that surprising. Go check out his music, The Flashbulb, he's one of my favorite artists.
clickety_clack · 17h ago
Wow, I have not been on YouTube in a long time. Couldn’t skim through the video. So many ads.
Seems like a cool idea based on the comments here though.
beardsciences · 20h ago
This is really incredible. I love easter eggs/hidden things in spectrograms. The implications of this are really cool, regardless of whether is it lossy or not.
ranger_danger · 20h ago
When this was posted to reddit, the comments were just full of people arguing over the semantics and saying how wrong the author was for using the word PNG when the actual technique is extremely lossy... completely glancing over the entire video, the dedication, knowledge and complexity involved with actually creating the video, the incredible feats of the birds themselves, and the reality that youtube basically forces you to use clickbait titles in order to get views.
frollogaston · 18h ago
I don't like the "PNG" part because it made me think he's storing arbitrary binary data. It's not even a matter of lossiness, cause these aren't JPG either, these are analog drawings. And it's not like this is overanalyzing the video, cause the author did talk about how many KB you can store this way.
No comments yet
justincormack · 19h ago
You could easily add some error correction to it!
No comments yet
nitwit005 · 17h ago
We're going to have to update rfc1149 to include this new persistence feature.
fudged71 · 17h ago
Wait. They should try a QR Code because it has error correction built in
flysand7 · 17h ago
I don't think the birds will like the sounds of that :)
lazyeye · 18h ago
TLDR: He represented a rudimentary picture of a bird in a spectographic image of a sound. Then got a bird to mimic that sound.
alterom · 18h ago
You missed the most important part:
..got the bird to mimic that sound with enough precision for the image to be clearly recognizable in the spectogram of the recording.
In fact, he didn't notice when the bird did it; he just stumbled into the picture he drew in the spectrum when looking at the data.
That's essentially what he has done. Except he did the modulation/demodulation with audio software (and, technically, stored a monochrome bitmap, not a PNG).
Dial-up modems encode data in audio-frequency. Later modems used phase-shift keying¹, but the very early ones used frequency-shift keying², which is essentially encoding data in a frequency graph - i.e., drawing a line in a spectrum analyzer.
Drawing a bird in a spectrum analyzer is packing much more data than that; it's like playing several of those streams at once.
The bird has shown itself to be capable of remembering and reproducing multiplexed frequency-keyed streams.
>With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.
Literally a point made in the video³ at 18:34.
____________
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-shift_keying
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying
³ https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1114
It's a decent Fermi estimate¹ :)
We also don't know how many songs we can get the bird to memorize for us.
_________
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem
Thinking about it in reverse, how much data would it take to encode 1 second of birdsong in the most efficient audio codec I can imagine. If M4A or MP3 with the bitrate slammed way down isn't a fair comparison, then some birdsong-specific ML autoencoder... Probably 500 bytes? Would still be enough for a Twitter tweet.
A tweet within a tweet!
I Can Run Doom On A Bird
Literally made me laugh out loud.
The product recommendations at the end are gold too! A 'hacker' spirit there.
In terms of signal length, can you store the images/data in a flock of birds too? I wonder what the RAID set-up of a flock of starlings is like? I'm thinking something like the Tines in Fire Upon the Deep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep
More crazily, can you get these data signals to be Turing complete? I know that not really what data is like in a vocalization pattern, but can you manage to get the birds' vocalizations to do logic of some sort and change patterns in more than a non-entropic way?
Crazy cool stuff!
It's not obvious at all that birds are able to reproduce multiplexed frequency-keyed streams with enough precisions to draw freaking pictures in spectrum analyzer graphs.
Humans can barely control their voices to nail one frequency. Badly.
These birds are capable of reproducing the output of several sound sources producing sounds at once, with near-perfect time and frequency precision.
Bird law in this country is not governed by reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
BTW, forgot to add: the video literally suggests that when they estimate how much data can be stored in birds.
The visualization of the byte sequence coming out of the Bluetooth speaker [1] (at 18:36 -18:38) starts with the oh-so-familiar 09 F9 11 02 9D ...
Ben is one step ahead of you :)
[1] https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1116
Now, if we figure out how to convince the birds it's a predator distress call (which, if you think about it, it kind of is), we can probably get it to persist across generations.
If you watch some of the other vids it does a perfect r2d2 impression, don't recall if it did it in Benn's.
You can also see his modular setup in the background.
I didn't know of him until today. Instantly, a new inspiration.
There could even be multiple carriers in the signal.
It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saac0ZtTeX4
https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-paint
The video shows the bird capable of remembering and reproducing 5-10 frequency graphs simultaneously (which you'd need to draw a picture), so you can multiplex those.
> There could even be multiple carriers in the signal.
Or same carrier, but different sets of frequency keys for each stream.
> It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
Maybe they do, someone should ping Ben to test that :D
Among other things, he also covers (lightly) bird vocal anatomy, audio "cameras", birding apps & equipment.
_____
¹ https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
Seems like a cool idea based on the comments here though.
No comments yet
No comments yet
..got the bird to mimic that sound with enough precision for the image to be clearly recognizable in the spectogram of the recording.
In fact, he didn't notice when the bird did it; he just stumbled into the picture he drew in the spectrum when looking at the data.