A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.
Hmm, not so sure. He produced a digital signal, who’s spectrogram happened to be an image, and then played that digital signal to a bird. Dunno if a analogue spectrogram really even makes sense as a concept. The only analogue part of the chain would be the birds vocalisations, right?
The whole sequence is:
To be transferring digital information, we would instead need to modulate and demodulate the digital signal (exactly like an old modem) so that the analogue corruption does not affect the digital signal:
I extremely doubt that this bird is capable of 2MB/s. For reference that would make it 280+ times fast than dialup, and barely slower than ADSL. This setup is basically just using the bird instead of a telephone line.
These steps are literally the same thing. You’re converting some data into sound for the bird to hear.
Edit: Actually, most physical modulation schemes use sinusoids anyways. So that’s exactly the same as playing a spectrum.
Yes, the near-identical sentences (only drawing a distinction between the processes where one exists) would indicate that. The “heard by the bird” and “reproduced by the bird” steps were also the same. But this is necessary context to make clear the digital data (“bit-stream”) that is being modulated into the signal.
It is far from “exactly the same”. The similarity is only in that both go through the same analogue channel. The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly, while the spectrogram cannot.
The article title says they converted a PNG and the bird was able to “recall the file”, and yet it produced an indisputably different file. That it looks vaguely the same to the cursory human observer does not make it the same file.
But this isn’t true. Just because a signal is modulated doesn’t mean it can’t be distorted.
A spectrogram is just showing that arbitrary data can be sent though this channel. It’s literally a form of modulation.
The sound from the speakers he must have used was also “analog”. Sound - defined as a pressure wave through a medium - can’t be digital. Though the difference between analog and digital kinda loses meaning in cases like this.
Every signal is ultimately analog. Voltage along a wire, sound, light, the world is analog and it all needs to be converted into our concept of digital (which is typically binary values).