If you think it’s hard to work from home, consider the spider that lives at work in a house that built it. Arachnids use their intricate webs to capture meals, navigating the structure using the vibrations they perceive through the hair on its legs.
Today, a team of MIT researchers reports that they have translated the vibrations into musical tone. What’s more, they make the prospect of one day communicating with spiders, and use their vibrational world as a medium for language.
The team presented their research today during the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society. To find out the sounds of a spider web, they housed a spider in their laboratory and scanned the web that built it into two-dimensional cross-sections with laser.
“Spiders live in this vibrating universe … they live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can use nowss, ”said Markus Buehler, a materials scientist by MIT, in a phone call. “One of the things we can do with this tool with this approach is that for the first time we can start to feel a little like a spider or experience the world like a spider.”
Buehler is also a musician and often combines his knowledge of calculation science with composition and making music from processes of the natural world. The Spider Web Project is bigger (literally) than his previous work, which focused on translating proteins into musical compositions. One recent project translated an important protein of the new coronavirus into audio. Many of these musical interpretations of the world are underway Buehler’s Soundcloud, and all paraphrasing of sounds that naturally play at vibrational frequencies beyond the capabilities of the human ear. Buehler and his team of seven transpose it into our audible range. The artist Tomás Saraceno has been digitized the 3D web, turn it into visualizations that reveal themselves true complexity.
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“Unlike a protein, where we have to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, a spider follows Newtonian mechanics,” Buehler said. ‘We can use the same equations as for a guitar string. The material properties are different, but in essence it is the same equation for the vibration itself. ”
The spider web is rendered in three dimensions and looks like the spectral image of a nebula. The team attributed specific sound frequencies to the strings of the web, in the same way that the pitch of a guitar string will increase the shorter you make the string. They have constructed through the course of the web and shed light on how the vibrations that the spider senses over time take on different colors and sounds.
They go a step further than producing the sound image of the web. This team produced a virtual reality program in which a viewer plays the spider and is able to “pick” any component of the web to hear how sound resonates from it.
When playing the internet, the researchers would isolate sound coming from one part of it. Otherwise, Buehler said, the sound would be cacophonous to the human ear. Depending on your perspective, the song of the spider may sound like wind chimes in the Twilight Zone or a bad tinnitus attack. (I’ve never been near Aragog or Shelob before, but it sounds just as scary as I imagine a spider is lying).
It’s not our native language, but it’s a lot like the beginning of Childish Gambino’s “Me and Your Mama”. For a spider, the sounds mean survival, as they can hear the impact of prey on the internet or feel the tap dance of a suitor.
The long-term goal is to be able to communicate with a spider on a web, Buehler said. To begin the process, researchers will “play” the web in a way that its creator and resident respond. Later, an imitation of another spider in conversation can pave the way for talking to the arachnids.
“Spiders are silent, and the web itself is also something you do not associate with sound,” Buehler said. “We’re trying to give the spider a voice … so maybe one day we can have a little chat with a spider and maybe play a song and jam together.”