If you think working from home is hard, consider the spider that lives at work in a house you built. Arachnids use their intricate fabrics to catch meals, navigating the structure through the vibrations it detects through the hairs on their legs.
Today, a team of MIT researchers report that they have translated these vibrations into musical tones. What’s more, they increase the prospect of someday communicating with spiders, using their vibrational world as a medium for language.
The team presented its research today during the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. To find out the sounds of a cobweb, they housed a spider in their lab and laser-scanned the fabric they built into two-dimensional cross-sections.
“Spiders live in this vibrational universe … they live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can now accessss, ”said the document’s co-author, Markus Buehler, at materials scientist at MIT, in a phone call. “One of the things we can do with this instrument is that, for the first time, we can start to feel a little bit like a spider or experience the world like the spider does.”
Also a musician, Buehler regularly combines his computer skills science with composition and makes music from processes of the natural world. The cobweb project is bigger (literally) than his previous work, which focused on the translation of proteins into musical compositions. A recent project translated a key coronavirus protein into sound. There are many of these musical performances in the world Buehler’s soundcloud, and all paraphrase sounds that play naturally at vibrational frequencies beyond the capabilities of the human ear. Buehler and his tshe of set transpose them to our audible range. The digitized artist Tomás Saraceno 3D websites, turning them into visualizations that reveal theirs real complexity.
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“Unlike a protein, where we have to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, a cobweb follows Newtonian mechanics,” Buehler said. “We can use the same equations we use for a guitar string. The properties of the material are different, but it is basically the same equation for the vibration itself ”.
Mapped in three dimensions, the web looks like the spectral image of a nebula. The team assigned specific sound frequencies to the network strings, in the same way that the pitch of a guitar string will increase the shorter it becomes. They did their scans throughout the construction of the net, shedding light on how the vibrations the spider perceives take on different tones and timbres over time.
They go a step beyond the production of soundscapes on the web. Tthe team has produced a virtual reality show in which the viewer plays the spider and is able to “boot” any component of the network to hear how the sound resonates.
When playing on the net, researchers would isolate the sound that came from a part of it. Otherwise, Buehler said, the sound would be cacophonous to the human ear. Depending on your perspective, the cobweb song may sound like wind chimes penumbra area or a bad tinnitus attack. (I’ve never been close to Aragagog or Shelob, but that sounds as terrifying as I imagine it would be a spider’s den).
It’s not our native musical language, though it bears a resemblance to the beginning of Childish Gambino’s “Me and Your Mama.” For a spider, sounds mean survival, as they may feel the impact of prey on the net or hear the key dance of a suitor.
The long-term aspiration is to be able to communicate with a spider on the net, Buehler said. To begin this process, researchers will “play” on the web in a way that generates a response from its creator and resident. Later, imitating another spider in the conversation could pave the way for talking to arachnids.
“Spiders are quiet and the net itself is also something that is not associated with sound,” Buehler said. “We try to give voice to the spider … so that one day we can chat with a spider and maybe play a song together and stumble.”