YouTuber saves PNG file to a live bird in what may be a world first

YouTuber Benn Jordan, a musician and acoustic scientist, has achieved what may be a world first: the saving of data from a live animal, specifically a bird.

That bird is a European starling, or a songbird that is able to mimic sounds extremely effectively through its vocal organ called a syrinx. Jordan explains that starlings are able to precisely produce multiple tones at the same time, meaning they are able to mimic almost any sound they hear. The bird in the video is shown mimicking sounds it wouldn't otherwise hear naturally in the wild, such as the sound a camera shutter makes when it opens and closes, or synthetic sounds created by humans.

Using a spectral synthesizer, which is a piece of software that shows a spectrogram, or the visual representation of how the frequencies that make up a sound change over time, Jordan drew an image of a bird. Essentially, this image consists of a collection of sounds that make up the image Jordan drew. He then played the sounds to the starling, who was able to mimic it. Jordan then captured the mimicked sound in the spectrogram to see if the image was correctly reproduced, and it was identical.

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"This little bird successfully learned and emulated the sound in the exact same frequency range that he heard it, effectively transferring about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information. Hypothetically, if this were an audible file transfer protocol that used a 10:1 data compression ratio, that's nearly 2 megabytes of information per second," said Jordan

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