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I saved a PNG image to a bird
- ranger_danger 1y agoWhen this was posted to reddit, the comments were just full of people arguing over the semantics and saying how wrong the author was for using the word PNG when the actual technique is extremely lossy... completely glancing over the entire video, the dedication, knowledge and complexity involved with actually creating the video, the incredible feats of the birds themselves, and the reality that youtube basically forces you to use clickbait titles in order to get views.
- justincormack 1y agoYou could easily add some error correction to it!
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- frollogaston 1y agoI don't like the "PNG" part because it made me think he's storing arbitrary binary data. It's not even a matter of lossiness, cause these aren't JPG either, these are analog drawings. And it's not like this is overanalyzing the video, cause the author did talk about how many KB you can store this way.
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- beardsciences 1y agoThis is really incredible. I love easter eggs/hidden things in spectrograms. The implications of this are really cool, regardless of whether is it lossy or not.
- strangattractor 1y agoBen's content is amazing in general. He has also built an sound camera and showed how to watermark recordings to confuse AI. Keep it up Ben!!
- m-hodges 1y agoHaving some hilarious thoughts about copyright. Bird law in this country is not governed by reason.
- progbits 1y agoTime to teach all local birds the AACS key :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
- alterom 1y agoThe video shows that there are many ways to do that :) Now, if we figure out how to convince the birds it's a predator distress call (which, if you think about it, it kind of is), we can probably get it to persist across generations.
- woodrowbarlow 1y agothis is what i've been wondering. is it feasible for a single diligent person to embed a message in an entire population of birds, in a manner that will persist generations? that's what i'd call a pretty good prank.
- alterom 1y agoTalk about Easter eggs!
- alterom 1y ago> Time to teach all local birds the AACS key :) BTW, forgot to add: the video literally suggests that when they estimate how much data can be stored in birds. The visualization of the byte sequence coming out of the Bluetooth speaker [1] (at 18:36 -18:38) starts with the oh-so-familiar 09 F9 11 02 9D ... Ben is one step ahead of you :) [1] https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1116 https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1116
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- anton-c 1y agoJust watched this last night. That bird "the mouth" is beautiful and incredible. Love Benn Jordan's insane content. If you watch some of the other vids it does a perfect r2d2 impression, don't recall if it did it in Benn's.
- schindlabua 1y agoAlso he's literally The Flashbulb of 2000s IDM fame. Some people are really just good at everything.
- alterom 1y agoAt some time in the video he's casually played a groove on the piano to back the birds for a couple of second, then stopped ("Wait, what am I doing") :) You can also see his modular setup in the background. I didn't know of him until today. Instantly, a new inspiration.
- hoherd 1y agoHe has a great video where he goes through a bunch of different software that Aphex Twin used over the years. https://youtu.be/5wIOBBodoic https://youtu.be/5wIOBBodoic
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoWhat a ride. I kept waiting for the punchline to be something dumb, like "we fed a USB drive to a bird" or "we tied a recording to a bird," and then when I realized what they were gonna do, I was shocked. It should have been obvious, but it was very clever! Really cool.
- alterom 1y ago>It should have been obvious It's not obvious at all that birds are able to reproduce multiplexed frequency-keyed streams with enough precisions to draw freaking pictures in spectrum analyzer graphs. Humans can barely control their voices to nail one frequency. Badly. These birds are capable of reproducing the output of several sound sources producing sounds at once, with near-perfect time and frequency precision.
- cluckindan 1y agoThey even reproduce the reverb of the space they’re in when they hear sounds.
- coreyh14444 1y agoYeah, I also appreciate that I hadn't heard of this Youtubber before and I couldn't tell if he was a sound engineer who happened to make a video about birds or a bird guy who was playing with sound. Seems like both!
- lucyjojo 1y agoit happens he's a musician who dropped out of high school. also a personal hero.
- jonny_eh 1y agoWe need a new RFC
- isege 1y agolmao
- bigbuppo 1y agoSeriously. Major security implications here as there's a potential for replay attacks.
- alterom 1y agoRFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers, 1990)¹ needs a 2025 update :D _____ ¹ https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149
- joshmarlow 1y agoFun (?) fact - with this protocol you could use a trained Hawk as a firewall.
- alterom 1y agoDefinitely a fun fact :D
- aflag 1y agoI 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.
- busymom0 1y agoNext Video: I Can Run Doom On A Bird
- alterom 1y ago>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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-shift_keying ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-shift_keying ³ https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1114 https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1114
- Balgair 1y agoAmazing! The product recommendations at the end are gold too! A 'hacker' spirit there. In terms of signal length, can you store the images/data in a flock of birds too? I wonder what the RAID set-up of a flock of starlings is like? I'm thinking something like the Tines in Fire Upon the Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep More crazily, can you get these data signals to be Turing complete? I know that not really what data is like in a vocalization pattern, but can you manage to get the birds' vocalizations to do logic of some sort and change patterns in more than a non-entropic way? Crazy cool stuff!
- data-ottawa 1y agoLet's try a light weight Blockchain on a swarm of starlings.
- any1 1y agoDrawing into the spectrogram is a fun trick. I would really like to know how much data you can store in that bird using some digital modulation method such as FSK (frequency shift keying). There could even be multiple carriers in the signal. It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK!
- alterom 1y ago> I would really like to know how much data you can store in that bird using some digital modulation method such as FSK (frequency shift keying). The video shows the bird capable of remembering and reproducing 5-10 frequency graphs simultaneously (which you'd need to draw a picture), so you can multiplex those. > There could even be multiple carriers in the signal. Or same carrier, but different sets of frequency keys for each stream. > It would be even cooler if the bird were to preserve phase. Then you could use PSK! Maybe they do, someone should ping Ben to test that :D
- drmpeg 1y agoHere's what 4096 carriers looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saac0ZtTeX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saac0ZtTeX4 https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-paint https://github.com/drmpeg/gr-paint
- cluckindan 1y agoA totally new meaning for carrier pigeon.
- nashashmi 1y agoI came here for the tl;dw comments. :(
- Lammy 1y agoJust skip to here: https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1019 https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1019
- AceJohnny2 1y agoThe video covers a wide range of topics related to birds and audio. The title topic is actually only a small segment of the whole video, arguably not the most interesting one! Among other things, he also covers (lightly) bird vocal anatomy, audio "cameras", birding apps & equipment.
- haunter 1y agoI hate modern Youtube that now every single "serious" topic video is +30 mins length. 10 years ago we were perfectly fine with 10 mins stuff but of course algorithms and advertising and nowadays most Youtuber is pushing longer and longer videos as if we are watching peak evening television reporting...
- frollogaston 1y agoI've heard this a lot, but is there confirmation of this somewhere? I'd actually expect a longer video to generate less engagement, cause fewer people want to watch all that.
- retox 1y agoThe longer compilation videos are because of sleeping viewers. You can cram them with as many ads as you like.
- frollogaston 1y agoAt the end of the day though, the most money is made by getting people to actually pay attention to the ads. Shorter videos might really accomplish that best. I imagine YouTube is aware of sleeping users, and if advertisers aren't realizing the engagement they expect for what they pay, they'll go elsewhere.
- lazyeye 1y agoTLDR: He represented a rudimentary picture of a bird in a spectographic image of a sound. Then got a bird to mimic that sound.
- alterom 1y agoYou missed the most important part: ..got the bird to mimic that sound with enough precision for the image to be clearly recognizable in the spectogram of the recording. In fact, he didn't notice when the bird did it; he just stumbled into the picture he drew in the spectrum when looking at the data.
- fudged71 1y agoWait. They should try a QR Code because it has error correction built in
- flysand7 1y agoI don't think the birds will like the sounds of that :)
- clickety_clack 1y agoWow, I have not been on YouTube in a long time. Couldn’t skim through the video. So many ads. Seems like a cool idea based on the comments here though.
- nitwit005 1y agoWe're going to have to update rfc1149 to include this new persistence feature.
- flysand7 1y agoWatched this video yesterday, and damn, it's really delightful watching experts make content about things they are passionate about. This love and passion is contageous, and even me, who up to this point knew almost nothing about birds has gained a new appreciation and love for these creatures. The fact that they can copy sounds is kinda incredible, and makes me want to listen more to them singing.
- kyrofa 1y agoWow, my worlds are colliding right now-- although seeing Benn on HN in retrospect shouldn't be that surprising. Go check out his music, The Flashbulb, he's one of my favorite artists.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]