Yes, you read that right: spider music.
Great acoustics
Scientists from MIT have just dropped an incredible piece of a brand new music genre that we think can really get started: spider music.
They made 3D scans of spider webs which they then entered into a virtual environment so that they could manipulate web images in different ways and transform the resulting structures and their acoustic properties into music, according to a press release on research the team Monday’s meeting of the American Chemical Society.
“The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings,” Markus Buehler, project leader and MIT engineer, said in the press release. “They do not see very well, and therefore they feel their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.”
You can – and should – listen to an example of the music here.
Grammy season
To create the music, the scientists assigned different notes to different strings of a web and then composed a kind of melody based on the 3D structure of the web and the way spiders construct their webs over time.
The music itself sounds a bit confused and confusing – like the videos of cats walking over pianos. But it’s at least more interesting than the music scientists did a while ago with star activity, and the harp-like instrument and an echo effect give the music a surrounding ghost quality that also matches arachnids.
Spider senses
The spider music is a fun experiment on its own. But the MIT scientists really want to play it for an arachnid audience instead of a human one – and see if they can use the musical vibrations to control spiders’ behavior.
“Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider,” Buehler said in the release. ‘If we expose them to rhythmic or vibrational patterns, can we then influence what they do, and can we begin to communicate with it? These are really exciting ideas. ”
READ MORE: MIT scientists translate the structure of a spider web into music – watch and listen [American Chemical Society]
More about spiders: Whose brilliant idea was it to bring spiders to the space station?
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