Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling Forget flash storage – flock storage is here after it was demonstrated that data can be saved to a bird. Proof that birds can be used to store data was uploaded to YouTube by Benn Jordan, a musician and researcher, who, during the half-hour video, encoded a drawing of a bird into sound via a spectral synthesizer, and persuaded …
Soon they will be singing whole spectral films.
My guess is that they next will demand royalty payment for their performances. And, talking about royalties, it is only fair they get royalties for the period of life + 70 years. Their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-chicks are in dire need to profit from the achievements.
Dammit. Your comment lead me down a rabbit hole (or into a dovecote?) of trying to remember the details of a video I saw a while back, probably on YouTube, possibly just a short, certainly not too long, about how some recent-ish (i.e. past couple of decades, maybe) piece of popular music resembles some bird's song, whether deliberately or not, to the point that people thought the birds had learnt the song from exposure to it, rather than more the other way around. I do remember it ended with a joke about the band owing the birds royalties. If anyone could help further jog my memory, either with the video, the song, or the birds in question, yeah, that'd be great.
I'd read that starlings can mimic English words, but this takes it to new heights.
Rooks and Ravens are enthusiastic mimics (inc. tractors and chainsaws) and some can use words, like a grey parrot does, to refer to objects. The rooks also seem to have a simple native vocabulary, as do chimps, but so far we've not detected any animal/bird using a vocabulary as an actual language.
Yeah, near 12:10 in the YT Benn indicates starlings may be able to count up higher than some other birds (eg. to 7, vs 4 for crowes) giving them an edge in fractal murmurations ... that and the song bird's syrinx at 2:50.
Quite a cool video ... and for those who just want to see the 176 KB drawing and how it is stored in the bird, that's at 13:30 and 17:15 ... fascinating stuff!
The obvious initial experiment is to try and train the aforementioned starling to sing the Doom theme. Bird calls outside mating season are warnings to other birds that the tree is occupied, so the threat of Ultraviolence may prove beneficial in that regard.
(Just don't let them sing it during mating season. We don't want there to be any confusion over consent when the male starling says he thought she was singing "Hurt Me Plenty".)
Beware: this is completely off topic, I just hate pigeons.
Not sure if you can play Doom on a pigeon, but I would definitely would like to play real life Doom with pigeons (and seagulls) as “participants”... Both aforementioned species have done a number 2 on my cranial area in the past. The seagull was the first, many decades ago, while crossing the channel, about half an hour before reaching Dover. The second one was a pigeon that decided to nest just above my front door and found the moment of me leaving for work an excellent time for its ablutions.
According to various sources the odds of this happening are very low, let alone it happening twice in a lifetime. Even so, I would not trust any kind of bird with my data. Before you know it that data may be dumped on someone else.
.... combine this with the Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers then you wouldn't even have to worry about printing out the data packet and attaching it the the avian leg!
----------> Our favourite avian carrier!
"But I also want to be candid and say that birds are an awful vector for data transmission, as is any living thing due to the many unpredictable variables at odds with how we store binary data."It sounds as though Prof. Jordan has never heard of IP over Avian Carriers, somewhat surprising given his apparent background.
ETA: Ninja'ed by KittenHuffer!
Remember compress and encrypt before trusting your secrets to fast feathered storage.
"Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie."
Some sort of avian raid tech ?
Coincidentally just now the announcer on the wireless mentioned† a murmuration of starlings which looks like avian cloud storage. ;)
† introducing "A Drunken Fingerprint Across the Sky" Ade Vincent.
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