Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling
- Reference: 1753871092
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/07/30/encoded_audio_starling_song/
- Source link:
Proof that birds can be used to store data was uploaded to YouTube by Benn Jordan, a musician and researcher, who, during the half-hour [1]video , encoded a drawing of a bird into sound via a spectral synthesizer, and persuaded a starling to add that sound to its vocabulary. The bird did so (among other sounds) and sang it back to Jordan, effectively demonstrating storage and playback.
"Starlings can do something... phenomenal," said Jordan. "They can effectively record and replay nearly any sound that they hear."
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Jordan was working on a project about analyzing bird songs when he came across a Starling named "The Mouth", rescued and cared for by artist and animal rescuer, Sarah Tidwell.
[3]
[4]
"The Mouth" appeared to be capable of learning sounds and singing them with remarkable accuracy. Noting that other birds in the same order can detect light pattern changes above 150 Hz, Jordan said: "Temporal resolution is also very important when we consider starling songs. The higher resolution means that the seconds last much longer to a starling."
The upshot is that any imperfections are much more noticeable in what you might call bird time. "This is exactly why we're using special ultrasonic microphones... so we can slow things down."
[5]
Jordan told The Register : "I've worked with 'sound drawing' for music and sound design for decades, so that aspect of the experiment was almost an afterthought that I quickly did."
The sound representation of Jordan's drawing was played to the starling a few times. But while the bird appeared to be paying attention, Jordan said in the video, "we didn't hear him clone it or sing it."
[6]And now for our annual 'Tape is still not dead' update
[7]HAMR time: Seagate unleashes 30 TB disks to feed the AI beast
[8]UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives
[9]WD escapes half a billion in patent damages as judge trims award to $1
Back at his computer, Jordan went through the gigabytes of sounds recorded during the session and spotted what looked like a bird-shaped figure in the spectrogram. It had been combined with another type of vocalization, but the drawing was definitely there.
Unbeknownst to the humans, the bird was more than just paying attention. The Register asked how quickly the sound was added to the bird's vocabularly. "Instantly!" replied Jordan. "I played it maybe 5 times as I truly didn't expect him to pick it up unless he was exposed to it routinely and thought it was another bird living in his environment."
"We lost a little bit of precision in the starling song, and he was about 50 to 60 Hz flat," said Jordan in the video. "Musically, that means literally nothing up in the 4,000 Hz range."
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"This little bird successfully learned and emulated the sound in the exact same frequency range that he heard it, effectively transferring about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information."
It's a neat demonstration of what a starling is capable of. "While there are a lot of caveats and limitations there," Jordan went on, "the fact that you could set up a speaker in your yard and conceivably store any amount of data in song birds is crazy."
We asked Jordan if there might be more attempts in the future. "I suppose if I were to try again, I'd use FT8 signals, which are used in amateur radio and designed to transmit data with the imperfections of analog signals.
"But I also want to be candid and say that birds are an awful vector for data transmission, as is any living thing due to the many unpredictable variables at odds with how we store binary data.
That said, "It was a cool magic trick to get my viewers to learn about birds, and hopefully inspire some of them to learn more and contribute to the ornithology community."
But can you play Doom on a pigeon? ®
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[1] https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/23/lto_2024_tape_shipment_data/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/15/seagate_hamr_drives/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/08/uk_police_dangle_75_million/
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[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: And if they pass it down to chicks ....
Soon they will be singing whole spectral films.
My guess is that they next will demand royalty payment for their performances. And, talking about royalties, it is only fair they get royalties for the period of life + 70 years. Their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-chicks are in dire need to profit from the achievements.
Re: And if they pass it down to chicks ....
Dammit. Your comment lead me down a rabbit hole (or into a dovecote?) of trying to remember the details of a video I saw a while back, probably on YouTube, possibly just a short, certainly not too long, about how some recent-ish (i.e. past couple of decades, maybe) piece of popular music resembles some bird's song, whether deliberately or not, to the point that people thought the birds had learnt the song from exposure to it, rather than more the other way around. I do remember it ended with a joke about the band owing the birds royalties. If anyone could help further jog my memory, either with the video, the song, or the birds in question, yeah, that'd be great.
Re: And if they pass it down to chicks ....
... and if they can also learn to [1]Poisonify their compositions (to protect them from A I snarfage -- a tech developed by the same Benn Jordan), then they should be set for a good while indeed ... ;)
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/bad_trip_coming_for_ai/
A New Excuse
The cat ate my homework.
Re: A New Excuse
The cat wrote my homework.
Hacking the Flock
Tom Lehrer's "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" , is a description of a hacking crime
Re: Hacking the Flock
So that is why I get so many [1]rfc1149 dropped packets.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
Cheep storage
nt
Everyone knows that
The bird is the word
I'd heard
I'd read that starlings can mimic English words, but this takes it to new heights.
Rooks and Ravens are enthusiastic mimics (inc. tractors and chainsaws) and some can use words, like a grey parrot does, to refer to objects. The rooks also seem to have a simple native vocabulary, as do chimps, but so far we've not detected any animal/bird using a vocabulary as an actual language.
Re: I'd heard
I hear the Orange Crested Trump can mimic English words but experts believe they are random sounds rather than anything coherent
Re: I'd heard
Yeah, near 12:10 in the YT Benn indicates starlings may be able to count up higher than some other birds (eg. to 7, vs 4 for crowes) giving them an edge in fractal murmurations ... that and the song bird's syrinx at 2:50.
Quite a cool video ... and for those who just want to see the 176 KB drawing and how it is stored in the bird, that's at 13:30 and 17:15 ... fascinating stuff!
"But can you play Doom on a pigeon?"
The obvious initial experiment is to try and train the aforementioned starling to sing the Doom theme. Bird calls outside mating season are warnings to other birds that the tree is occupied, so the threat of Ultraviolence may prove beneficial in that regard.
(Just don't let them sing it during mating season. We don't want there to be any confusion over consent when the male starling says he thought she was singing "Hurt Me Plenty".)
Re: "But can you play Doom on a pigeon?"
Beware: this is completely off topic, I just hate pigeons.
Not sure if you can play Doom on a pigeon, but I would definitely would like to play real life Doom with pigeons (and seagulls) as “participants”... Both aforementioned species have done a number 2 on my cranial area in the past. The seagull was the first, many decades ago, while crossing the channel, about half an hour before reaching Dover. The second one was a pigeon that decided to nest just above my front door and found the moment of me leaving for work an excellent time for its ablutions.
According to various sources the odds of this happening are very low, let alone it happening twice in a lifetime. Even so, I would not trust any kind of bird with my data. Before you know it that data may be dumped on someone else.
Cloud
And Starling can transfer the data to the cloud, the proper way.
DOH!
I said I needed you to acquire and install STARLINK service at the site, not STARLING!
If you were to ...
.... combine this with the [1]Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers then you wouldn't even have to worry about printing out the data packet and attaching it the the avian leg!
----------> Our favourite avian carrier!
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
The RFCs never lie!
"But I also want to be candid and say that birds are an awful vector for data transmission, as is any living thing due to the many unpredictable variables at odds with how we store binary data." It sounds as though Prof. Jordan has never heard of [1]IP over Avian Carriers , somewhat surprising given his apparent background.
ETA: Ninja'ed by KittenHuffer!
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
There used to be a starling near our lab in Belfast that regularly imitated a Trimphoone. What a pity it never got to hear a modem.
For high-end bird storage, you want the Superb Lyrebird
Who can forget this jaw-dropping excerpt from David Attenborough's Life on Earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ
Re: For high-end bird storage, you want the Superb Lyrebird
Very nice clip! The chainsaw sounds (at the end) are quite impressive and, in relation to Benn's YT (at 15:08), the Lyre Bird could sure get the Starling interested with its impression of camera shutter sounds ...
Microsoft already interested!
After trying unsuccessfully for years to get a Bird on the Wire, they are all: 'Come over to Windows, my little starling!'
RIP L.C.
As starlings are migratory...
... you're guaranteed off-site backups.
Though the latency for retrieval from an off-site starling backup could run into many months.
A novel take on "a little bird told me."
Remember compress and encrypt before trusting your secrets to fast feathered storage.
"Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie."
Some sort of avian raid tech ?
Coincidentally just now the announcer on the wireless mentioned † a murmuration of starlings which looks like avian cloud storage. ;)
† introducing [1]" A Drunken Fingerprint Across the Sky " Ade Vincent.
[1] https://adevincent.bandcamp.com/track/a-drunken-fingerprint-across-the-sky-work-for-solo-guitar
RTTY is better
I'm quite sure RTTY is much better than FT8 for a bird. Two tones are much easier to them than phase modulation.
And if they pass it down to chicks ....
things get really interesting ....