My spidey senses are tingling. MIT researches about the weirdest things and that’s alright. Science demands innovation whatever kind it is. These scientists created a new genre of music that we needed and but definitely don’t deserve. It is called Spider music. drum roll or spider roll?
Now the question is, how did they do it? Did they make the spiders sing? or trained them to play instruments? The answer is none of the above. Spiders are too small and have no fingers to play instruments. According to a press release, of the meeting of the American Chemical Society, the scientists created a 3D scan of the spider webs left behind the spiders and imported them all into a virtual environment.
By doing this, it allowed them to interact and manipulate the webby structures in different ways. They converted the structures into acoustics and music. In order to actually create the music, different notes were assigned to different strands of the webs. This combined with the intricate structures spiders make, created a jumbled up melody of sorts.
You can listen to a sample below. Sounds better than that Bieber song.
According to MIT Engineer, Markus Buehler, “The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings. They don’t see very well, so they sense their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.” It is said that they can locate where their prey is even by the slightest vibration of their string.
“Now we’re trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider” Buehler further added. “f we expose them to certain patterns of rhythms or vibrations, can we affect what they do, and can we begin to communicate with them? Those are really exciting ideas”.
How long till they breed their own genetically enhanced super spiders?