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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] threadBird law in this country is not governed by reason.
If you watch some of the other vids it does a perfect r2d2 impression, don't recall if it did it in Benn's.
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!
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!
Seems like a cool idea based on the comments here though.