Had this in my Watch Later. Nice spoiler.
I saw this elsewhere and thought it was bs earlier, but this time I decided to check it out.
It’s in the first minute of the video.
Your starling enthusiast is named Sterling?
Local mocking birds still sing that car alarm that hasn’t been popular in at least a decade. They love it and they’re the only ones
How many birds do I need for about 4 hours at 15 Mbps? I want to watch The Return of the King in 4k.
One standard murmur.
You might need a murder of crows for that one.
Can starlings teach their friends songs? It’d be neat if the PNG bird song was pass down through the generations for future interplanetary visitors to discover
The analog distortion would be fun to watch propagate from bird to bird.
That’d make for a great element in a modern remake of the movie, The Birds.
Researchers trying to reduce the distortion are tracking the patterns. They can’t figure it out until a main character, a blind audiologist who lost his vision in the first attack many decades ago, has an epiphany and suggests assembling the images in sequence to form a video. It shows a bird flying and flapping its wings. The researchers keep gathering data, making the video longer and more complex.The bird now also does loops and spins. The researchers set up remote microphones all over the world and network them with their computer so it can compile in real time.
We learn that blind main character has now trained himself to “see” the images that he hears. Main character and love interest colleague walk through the park discussing their work as a flimsy pretext to spend time together. All of a sudden, the birdsong changes. “Run, love interest!” says main character, but love interest won’t leave main character behind. The camera pans over to the computer screen in their laboratory, which overlooks the park. The video now shows another scene at the end, an enormous eagle shredding a person with its talons and beak.
That’s all I’ve got so far.
goddamn this is gold get this tooth a tongue for godsake!
I’m sold
…well, now it’s an animated .gif but each frame is a separate bird.
Birds are memes propagators into the future. Human civilization ends, but the starlings keep the memes alive… interesting idea for a story.
OOooh, what if we are spectrographing bird calls and suddenly we see a picture develop out of it. Or, you could use birds to store data and no one would ever know, like a spy thing.
Imagine ending up in prison because your bird picked up something wildly illegal and immoral from the song of a neighbor.
No shit, they’re drones. Drones have been able to store data forever.
How many starlings do I need to store and play Doom?
I dunno, but here’s an example of Doom over audio spectrography to help get you started. Sorry in advance for the devil link:
Doom spectrogram via the most wretched hive of scum and villainy that starts with the letter ‘R’
Hate to be that guy, but PNG is a lossless format… Not sure bird based storage is lossless lol
They should have credited Benn Jordan, aka The Flashbulb, as the one who came up with this idea. Link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5boHere’s the video this is referencing, for those interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo
Love his channel - he really does just spend months at a time following some ridiculous audio-based whim and he puts so much effort into it.
I love unhinged data storage methods. My favorite is storing data in internet server pings to australia: Harder Drive
A close runner up goes to Can you store a Pokemon silver save INSIDE of Pokemon Emerald? Adef made his own video on it in I Turned Pokemon Emerald into a Flash Drive
Anyone have more? This is like my favorite genre of internet nonsense
I liked this one a lot
There was this perdon who encoded their data in video and uploaded it to YouTube.
What if all songbirds today are just singing encoded messages from a long dead civilization, passed down through generations of birds, and we just haven’t realised it yet
But the reason there is nothing obvious on the spectrogram is because it’s compressed data
*hits bong*
X account is called Sterling, talking about a Starling, if you didn’t notice…
Benn Jordan is one of my favorite musicians, YouTubers, and people in the world. Highly recommended
Same, started following him about 6 months to a year ago and quickly became a fan
It was nice, but a good test for the megabytes being claimed would be to reproduce a color photo with far more definition. PNG is a lossless format, and I’m pretty sure birds and spectrograms aren’t reproducing what they can do. (There’s a reason there’s only one example)
I haven’t yet watched the video, but from the posted images, it looks like they converted the image itself to a frequency spectrum, so no image format encoding was involved before it reached the point of being audio.
Reminds me of IP over avian carriers ☺
