Scientists Create Music From Spider Webs, And Learn Spider Speech

A spider web sparkling in the sunlight can be a sight for sore eyes, especially if pearl-like dewdrops are hanging on the thin spider silk in the morning. But I get it.

Most of us aren¡¯t a big fan of the creepy crawly, some are even terrified. But before you swat away another spider web, remember this: you could be destroying your next musical instrument.

Mayank Mohanti for Indiatimes

Extracting music from spider web

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US said that they have translated the structure of a web into music, which could have applications ranging from better 3D printers to cross-species communication and otherworldly musical compositions.

¡°The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings,¡± says Markus Buehler, lead author of the project. ¡°They don¡¯t see very well, so they sense their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.¡± Such vibrations occur, for example, when the spider stretches a silk strand during construction, or when the wind or a trapped fly moves the web.

Buehler, who has long been interested in music, wondered if he could extract rhythms and melodies of non-human origin from natural materials, such as spider webs. ¡°Webs could be a new source for musical inspiration that is very different from the usual human experience,¡± he says.

Enter the world of spiders

For the research, scientists scanned a natural spider web with a laser to capture 2D cross-sections and then used computer algorithms to reconstruct the web¡¯s 3D network. The team assigned different frequencies of sound to strands of the web, creating ¡°notes¡± that they combined in patterns based on the web¡¯s 3D structure to generate melodies.

Isabelle Su and Markus Buehler

The researchers then created a harp-like instrument and played the spider web music in several live performances around the world. The team also made a virtual reality setup that allowed people to visually and audibly ¡°enter¡± the web.

¡°The virtual reality environment is really intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features that you might see but not immediately recognize,¡± Buehler says. ¡°By hearing it and seeing it at the same time, you can really start to understand the environment the spider lives in.¡±

In other experiments, the researchers also explored how the sound of a web changes as it¡¯s exposed to different mechanical forces, such as stretching.

Communicating with spiders

The team is also interested in learning how to communicate with spiders in their own language. For that purpose, they recorded web vibrations when spiders were building their web or communicating with fellow spiders.

Although the frequencies sounded similar to the human ear, a machine learning algorithm correctly classified the sounds into the different activities.

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¡°Now we¡¯re trying to generate synthetic signals to basically speak the language of the spider,¡± Buehler says. ¡°If 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.¡±

The findings will be presented at the forthcoming spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).