this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Not to be a wet blanket, but every time this comes up I get annoyed by some factual inaccuracies in the articles about this. It is not digital! He drew an image on a computer, but converted it to an analogue spectrogram to store on the bird. That's neat as hell, but it's not digital. The image that he got back was slightly corrupted.
Now I would be fascinated to see a follow-up seeing if you can actually modulate a digital signal and have is survive a round trip through the bird bit-for-bit accurate. I suspect in reality it would be much lower data rate, but definitely not nothing!
Hmm, not so sure. He produced a digital signal, who's spectrogram happened to be an image, and then played that digital signal to a bird. Dunno if a analogue spectrogram really even makes sense as a concept. The only analogue part of the chain would be the birds vocalisations, right?
The sound from the speakers he must have used was also "analog". Sound - defined as a pressure wave through a medium - can't be digital. Though the difference between analog and digital kinda loses meaning in cases like this.
Every signal is ultimately analog. Voltage along a wire, sound, light, the world is analog and it all needs to be converted into our concept of digital (which is typically binary values).