YouTube Creator Stored Image in Real Bird
A starling can recreate pictures.
There are many ways to store information nowadays, but living things are not what comes to mind usually. However, YouTube creator Benn Jordan did something extraordinary using his knowledge of music, animals, and science: he "stored" an image of a bird in a real bird.
He drew a simple picture of a bird in his spectral synthesizer and visited a smart starling, hoping it would repeat the resulting sound.
A couple of words about the synthesizer if you don't know what I mean. It manipulates harmonic content or frequencies. I'm sure you've seen such videos on TikTok or YouTube: when you play a sound, it can be shown as frequencies, or the other way around – draw anything, basically, and the hardware will play it for you.
So Jordan turned a picture of a bird into sounds and played it, among other spectral sounds, to the starling. When he looked at his recordings of the bird, he noticed a pattern that looked like the bird he drew, and truly, it sounded a lot like what Jordan "fed" it, which proves how talented the starling is.
"When I got home, when going through my many gigabytes of starling sounds in this recording session, I noticed a little bird in the spectrogram. At first, I thought I was just simply seeing my phone playing the sound to the starling, but this was much later in my visit, and it was combined with another type of vocalization."
So the bird learned and emulated a sound in the same frequency range that it heard it, "effectively transferring about 176 KB of uncompressed information," which is nearly 2 MB of information per second.
Of course, this is hardly an effective way to store information, but the experiment itself is quite fascinating.
If you want to hear more about animals, music, and science, check out Jordan's YouTube channel.
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