saving to the murmuration

[asakiyume]

"Holy shit. This guy saved a PNG to a bird," read the beginning of a Bluesky post that linked to a 30-minute Youtube video about birdsong and starlings' capacity for mimicry. A guy drew a picture of a bird in a spectral synthesizer, which then will produce the sounds that the lines indicate.** The guy played those sounds for a starling, and lo and behold, the bird copied it--such that when you look at the spectrogram, you see a picture of a bird that's very close to the picture the guy had drawn.

So it's in that sense that the guy saved an image to a starling.

I'm charmed that this involves translation from a visual medium to a sound medium. "We can save your picture, but only if you sing it." --This concept of translation is familiar to us, of course. Data that's stored digitally is translated into zeros and ones, then translated back into something we can understand--words, images, sounds, formulae.

... If we were going to use starlings to save our data, we'd have to beg not individual starlings but whole murmurations.

Imagine if you had to sing or say all your data to save it. Imagine going out and standing on a hill and taking a deep breath and just singing out, hoping that the murmuration would deign to listen and retain what you were singing. It would be like an incantation or an invocation or a prayer.



**A spectrograph of a bird's call looks like, for example, this:

(Song sparrow spectrograph from this web page)


So the guy drew the bird below and then played the sounds that this set of lines makes...



And the starling sang back this:



(Images are screenshots from the Youtube video.)

Comments

[kore]

That is FUCKING AMAZING. Really cheered me right up! T will love this.

[asakiyume]

I'm so glad--I loved it too. And I'm especially glad it'll cheer him up.

[heleninwales]

Imagine if you had to sing or say all your data to save it.

That's actually what the oral tradition was all about. People didn't just make up stories. Bards learned them off by heart from older bards and were tested to ensure that they were word perfect.

Re the experiment, starlings are brilliant mimics and are known for copying phone ring tones and other artificial sounds, but I didn't know they were so accurate.

[asakiyume]

Exactly what I was thinking, re: orality! As the twenty-first century continues to show us the downside of our technological advances, I think more and more about the technologies that have fallen by the wayside--like the oral tradition.

The particular starling that the guy in the video visited was one that had been raised by humans. One of its favorite noises was the phone camera shutter click. The guy also slowed birdsong, including this starling's song, down so that you could hear all the sounds that are normally too fast and high for our ears. Whole complexities that we completely miss, and he talked about the birds' sense of time. This starling was fascinated by the guy's locked-phone screen, which to our eyes looks boring and still, but which the guy hypothesized looks more like a strobing image to the starling.

[osprey_archer]

Oh, this is fascinating! And I love the image of someone singing/praying on the hillside, hoping the starlings will save their song.

[amaebi]

Beautiful.

[asakiyume]

It feels like something that's meant to be real, meant to happen!

[f0rrest]

Birds are crazy, in an amazing way. They have this sneaky intelligence and the simple fact they can fly, and all the symbolic freedom that comes along with that, is fascinating. I get why lots of people just end up watching them obsessively.

Also the whole "different animals perceive the world differently" thing is fascinating too, so many philosophical implications that I don't even want to get into right now.

[asakiyume]

Agreed about everything. The notion of time being different for living things--what's a second like for a mayfly? What's a decade like for a bristlecone pine--or a tortoise, if we're sticking to animals? It's like we're living in a four-dimensional chess game not knowing the rules, stuck just saying "whoa," like we're stoned.

[sartorias]

That is AMAZING.

I would read the heck out of a book whose only blurb is ""We can save your picture, but only if you sing it."

[asakiyume]

Right?? I feel like from now on this is how I want to save things. By singing them at the sky.

[athenais]

This is blowing my mind!

[asakiyume]

It sure did blow mine! When I saw that the Bluesky post linked to a 30-minute video, I was like, Oh COME ON... and then I ended up watching the whole thing (well, I turned it off for the last bit where he's talking about his equipment, but...)

[amaebi]

I love your reflections on this. Thank you!

[asakiyume]

Thank YOU for stopping by and reading! It's a topic that makes my mind buzz.

[sovay]

So it's in that sense that the guy saved an image to a starling.

I want to know what kind of song that will image will turn into with the drift of the starling population and time.

Imagine if you had to sing or say all your data to save it. Imagine going out and standing on a hill and taking a deep breath and just singing out, hoping that the murmuration would deign to listen and retain what you were singing. It would be like an incantation or an invocation or a prayer.

I like the sound of this form of residual haunting.

(It is not unlike the oral tradition. Most of the poems I have memorized, I can sing.)

[asakiyume]

I strongly think we need to revive orality--I mean, more than we already have it. We do share songs in person! And sometimes we share stories in person. In the immortal words of Ariel in Disney's Little Mermaid, I want more.

And yes re: poems you've memorized. A big Yes. (I can't--or anyway, haven't--done that with the poems I've memorized, but when I've liked songs in fantasy stories, I've sometimes set them to music. You know in the Harper Hall Pern series, when Menolly makes up a song for Brekke? I still have the tune I made up for that in my head.)

[sovay]

I strongly think we need to revive orality--I mean, more than we already have it. We do share songs in person! And sometimes we share stories in person. In the immortal words of Ariel in Disney's Little Mermaid, I want more.

It is one of the reasons I miss singing with people so much, or being on panels at conventions. I really enjoyed the period of my life when I had gigs as a professional storyteller.

(I can't--or anyway, haven't--done that with the poems I've memorized, but when I've liked songs in fantasy stories, I've sometimes set them to music. You know in the Harper Hall Pern series, when Menolly makes up a song for Brekke? I still have the tune I made up for that in my head.)

I made one up for the "Question Song."

(I may or may not have set Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus" to music. I know a tune for it that I have never heard anyone else sing, of which I have no recordings, and which I have no memory of learning. I live in mild paranoia of discovering it is actually a well-known tune that I heard so young I just forgot about attaching it to the poem, which I would have read for the first time around the age of five.)