How to Upload an Image to a Bird

Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera shutter sound. Jordan drew an image of a bird, played it as a sound, the starling played the sound back, and Jordan was able to see his bird drawing in the decoded sound.¹ That is, he uploaded a picture of a bird to a bird and then downloaded the bird picture from the bird. 🤯

That’s the hook of the video, but the whole thing is well-worth watching (perhaps save for the last 10 minutes, which is a nerdy deep-dive into equipment) — the explanation of bird acoustics is both interesting & entertaining.

Thanks to KDO reader Liana for sending me this video three days ago, a full 48 hours before it got linked to from everywhere yesterday. *sigh* Some days I wish there were four or five of me to handle all of the cool things I run across and that people send me.

P.S. The comments on the YouTube post are worth a read:

So for a few weeks I thought I was going crazy because I would hear my Samsung dryer “Load Complete” song play but I didn’t have the dryer going and it sounded far away but not like it was in the house. On Saturday, I was out working in the yard and heard it again and there was a bird perfectly emulating the “Load Complete” song note for note! I started the dryer and from the tree the bird was in, you can clearly hear the dryer which is I guess how it learned it. Nature is so cool!

Imagine teaching a whole species of birds one song that draws a bird on a spectrogram. Suppose it survives with the species for millennia. One hell of a trip for future civilisations to find.

yeah I host my files on an AAS (Avian Accessible Storage). It’s a cloud storage solution

A Rainbow Lorikeet chose me for a partner 4 years ago. Excellent mimic. He calls my two cats to the back door, ” Here Kitty Kitty, Here Puddy Puddy” in MY voice. The cats come, expecting and looking for me. The bird then proceeds to laugh at them, with MY laugh. I’m also attempting to teach him to whistle the last stanza of the Italian national anthem.

Can you run Doom… on a bird?

1. You’ll recall that this is how the Merlin Bird ID app cleverly identifies bird calls: by the image of a call’s spectrogram.↩

• Benn Jordan
• birds
• science
• sound
• video

How Loud Can Sound Physically Get?

Is there a physical limit to how loud a noise can be? As you might imagine, the answer is somewhat complicated, even if you assume normal atmospheric conditions. In video, Benn Jordan discusses a few possible answers, as well as how we should think about the question in the first place. One possible answer is 194 decibels, although experiencing a sound that loud would probably kill you.

See also The World’s Loudest Sound, aka the sound generated by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883, which Jordan mentions in the video.

• audio
• Benn Jordan
• science
• video