(Reuters) – It’s a haunting, ominous and reverberating song, enough to make you tingle in your spine.
This is what a cobweb sounds like.
From communication to construction, cobwebs can provide an orchestra of information, says Markus Buehler, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been using artificial intelligence to study them.
“Spiders use vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment and other spiders,” he said. “We recorded these vibrations of spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibrational patterns and associate them with certain actions, basically learning the language of the spider.”
Buehler and his team of researchers created 3D models of cobwebs when arachnids did different things, such as building, repairing, hunting, and feeding. They then listened to the patterns of the spider signals and recreated the sounds using computers and mathematical algorithms.
“Spiders are a completely different animal,” Buehler said. “What they see or hear is not audible or visible to the human eye or ear. And so, by transposing it, we begin to experience it. “
Buehler hopes his team’s work can allow humans to understand the language of a spider and one day communicate with them.
“Melodies are really the kind of relationships that the spider would also experience. And so we can start to feel a little bit like a spider that way, ”Buehler said.
There are over 47,000 species of spiders and all silk fabrics that spin to provide accommodation and capture food. Scientists say the silk of a cobweb is five times stronger than steel.
The living structure of a cobweb could lead to innovations in construction, maintenance and repair, Buehler said.
“We can imagine creating a synthetic system that would mimic what the spider does when it detects the net and repairs the net,” he said.
Report by Angela Moore; Edited by Karishma Singh