Spiders rely heavily on touch to feel the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered with small hairs and slits that can distinguish between different types of vibrations.
Prey that blunders in a web causes a very different vibration from another spider that thrives, or for example a breeze stirs. Each string of a web produces a different tone.
A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of a cobweb into music by working with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive musical instrument. Spider. Now the team has refined and built on the previous work and added an interactive virtual reality component to enable people to go in and communicate with the internet.
The research says the research will not only help them better understand the three-dimensional architecture of a spider, but can even help us learn the vibrational language of spiders.
“The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings,” said MIT engineer Markus Buehler. “They do not see very well, and therefore they feel their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.”
When you think of a cobweb, you most likely think of the web of a ball weaver: flat, round, with radial spokes around which the cob constructs a spiral web. However, most cobwebs are not of this nature, but built in three dimensions – such as sheet, swirl and funnel.
To investigate the structure of these types of webs, the team housed a tropical tent web spider (Cyrtophora citricola) in a rectangular casing, waiting for it to fill the space with a three-dimensional web. Next, they used a skin laser to illuminate and create 2D cross-sectional high-definition images of the web.
A specially developed algorithm compiled the 3D architecture of the web from this 2D cross-section. To turn it into music, different sound frequencies were assigned to different strings. The notes thus generated are according to patterns based on the web structure.
They also scanned a web while it was spinning, translating every step of the process into music. This means that the notes change as the structure of the web changes, and that the listener can hear the process of constructing the web; If you have a record of the step-by-step process, we can also better understand how spiders build a 3D web without support structures – a skill that can be used for 3D printing, for example.
Spider allowed audiences to hear the spider music, but the virtual reality, in which users can enter and play parts of the internet themselves, adds a new experience, the researchers said.
“The virtual reality environment is very intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features that you may see but not immediately recognize,” Buehler explained.
“By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really understand the environment in which the spider lives.”
This VR environment, with realistic web physics, enables researchers to understand what happens when they also mess with parts of the web. Stretch a thread and change the tone. Break one and see how it affects the other strings around. It can also help us understand the architecture of a spider web, and why it is built the way it is.
And perhaps most fascinatingly, the work enabled the team to develop an algorithm to identify the forms of vibrations of a cobweb, to translate it into ‘trapped prey’, or ‘web under construction’, or ‘ another spider arrived with amorous intent. “According to the team, this is the basis for the development of cobwebs – at least a tropical cobweb.
“Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider,” Buehler said.
“If we expose them to certain rhythms or vibrations, can we then influence what they do, and can we start communicating with them? These are really exciting ideas.”
The team presented their work during the American Chemical Society’s spring meeting. Their previous research is in 2018 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.