[aflag]

I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back. I think with the right format it should be possible to do that. With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.

[alterom]

>I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back.

That's essentially what he has done. Except he did the modulation/demodulation with audio software (and, technically, stored a monochrome bitmap, not a PNG).

Dial-up modems encode data in audio-frequency. Later modems used phase-shift keying¹, but the very early ones used frequency-shift keying², which is essentially encoding data in a frequency graph - i.e., drawing a line in a spectrum analyzer.

Drawing a bird in a spectrum analyzer is packing much more data than that; it's like playing several of those streams at once.

The bird has shown itself to be capable of remembering and reproducing multiplexed frequency-keyed streams.

>With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level.

Literally a point made in the video³ at 18:34.

____________

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-shift_keying

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying

³ https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1114

[frollogaston]

It's analog though. Presumably the shape of the image matters, like horizontal lines are easier than vertical, it's not just a bitmap. He made the point of how many KB you can store in the song, but is it right? There are different conceivable ways to store binary data in that. I have no idea how efficient it'd be to get something 99% reliable.

[alterom]

> He made the point of how many KB you can store in the song, but is it right?

It's a decent Fermi estimate¹ :)

We also don't know how many songs we can get the bird to memorize for us.

_________

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

[frollogaston]

He said 176KB of entropy in that 1-second birdsong, which doesn't seem close. That's more than the bitrate of a typical M4A, for a much simpler sound.

Thinking about it in reverse, how much data would it take to encode 1 second of birdsong in the most efficient audio codec I can imagine. If M4A or MP3 with the bitrate slammed way down isn't a fair comparison, then some birdsong-specific ML autoencoder... Probably 500 bytes? Would still be enough for a Twitter tweet.

[alterom]

> Would still be enough for a Twitter tweet.

A tweet within a tweet!

[SequoiaHope]

Inspired by the video I vibe coded up an application that lets you encode data in FSK and read the data bits back from a noisy recording. I think it would be fascinating for someone to try this! https://github.com/sequoia-hope/starling

[busymom0]

Next Video:

I Can Run Doom On A Bird

[nurettin]

European Starlings can imitate most doom sound effects.

[Balgair]

Thank you.

Literally made me laugh out loud.

[raphman]

"A Flock of Pigeons is Turing-Complete"