(Reuters) – It’s a creepy, ominous, resounding tune, enough to send a tingle down your spine.
This is what a cobweb sounds like.
From communication to construction, spider webs can provide an orchestra of information, says Markus Buehler, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who uses artificial intelligence to study it.
“Spiders use vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment with other spiders,” he said. “We recorded these vibrations of spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibration patterns and associate them with certain actions, and basically learn the language of the spider.”
Buehler and his team of researchers created 3D models of cobwebs when the arachnids did different things – such as construction, repair, hunting and feeding. They then listened to patterns in the spider signals and recreated the sounds using computers and mathematical algorithms.
“Spiders are a very different animal,” Buehler said. ‘What they see or feel is not actually audible or visible to the human eye or the human ear. And by transposing it, we begin to experience it. ”
Buehler hopes his team’s work can enable people to understand the language of a spider and communicate with them one day.
‘The melodies are really the kind of relationships that the spider would also experience. And that way we can start to feel a bit like a spider that way, ‘Buehler said.
There are more than 47,000 species of spiders, and all spin side webs to provide accommodation and capture food. According to scientists, the side 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 will mimic what the spider does to observe the web, and repair the web,” he said.
Reporting by Angela Moore; Edited by Karishma Singh