Only a matter of time before megacorps put ads and a subscription service on bird calls, now. 😫
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?
They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation
Pigeon guided missile but instead of pigeon it's a parrot and sings relevant source code in hex and an interpeter assembles it.
(I hate the last 4 words that sentence I made.)
Inb4 Doom can now run on birds.
Latency tho....
I want this to be the next reveal in a movie or TV series, in the same fashion as the one of the Navajo "backing up" the Smoking Man's magnetic tape in The X-Files.
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!
By your definition nothing can be digital since the world is analog. Even the bits in your CPU are voltages in transistors. As such, every real life signal can be distorted.
The point with digital transfers is that you round it back to either 0 or 1, hoping that no bits are distorted enough to have any loss at all.
Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.
Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.
This isn’t true in the general case. In the real world, you can have all kinds of distortions: random noise, time shifts, interference from other signals, etc.
You don’t usually see the effects of these because the protocols are designed with the communication channel characteristics in mind in order to reproduce the original signal.
Using birds is just another communication channel with its own distortion characteristics.
That's exactly what they said.
Precisely... And digital modulation's entire purpose is for a digital signal to survive those distortions bit-for-bit perfect. Even if we call the digitally-generated spectrogram digital information, the bird simply did not reproduce it exactly. Whatever time, frequency, and amplitude resolution you apply to the signal, if it's low enough that the bird reproduced the signal exactly within that discretized scheme, then it simply did not achieve 2 MB/s. I would bet that the Shannon capacity of this bird is simply nowhere near 2 MB/s.
If your argument is that the bandwidth calculation is incorrect, then sure I think that’s fair.
But I don’t think it’s correct to say it’s not a digital channel juts because it doesn’t have optimal bandwidth.
Gozz is correct. You're misunderstanding the nature of a digital signal. What the author did was convert a digital signal to an analog signal, store that analog signal on a bird, then record that analog signal. Whether it was redigitized after the fact is irrelevant. It is not a digital process end-to-end. This is the same as if I were to download a YouTube video, record that video on a VHS tape, then redigitize that video. Not only would the end result not be a bit for bit match, it wouldn't be a match at all despite containing some of the same visual information, because it would be the product of a digital-analog-digital conversion.
The bird drawing is just a proxy for arbitrary data. In your example, you could convert bitstream into a pattern of black and white squares into a YouTube Video. Send it through the VHS channel, and when you digitize it, you would get back the exact bitstream.
That’s not really how it works in the real world. Usually you have both bandwidth and noise constraints.
Sure you can send something like a square wave but this isn’t practical for real communication channels. Typically you’re sending many sine waves in parallel with multiple amplitudes and phase offsets to represent a sequence of bits (QAM). Then on top of that you’d encode the original data with both a randomizer (to prevent long runs from looking like nothing) and error correction. So usually the system can handle some level of distortion.
What you’re hoping is that by the time the data reaches the user (really, Layer 3), all the errors have already been handled and you never see any issues.
The bird is just another type of noisy channel with its own distortion characteristics.
The point is that at the physical layer you still have a well defined log likelihood test to produce digital information. That's why QAM lasted so long even though it is not power efficient - because it has an analytical likelihood function.
This is the boundary between digital and analog communications. Since he did not use a digital modulation scheme, this would be a form of analog comms
Why couldn’t you have a likelihood function for the bird?
As a trivial case, you can just say: Does the spectrum look like a bird? Then you’d have a digital channel by your definition for a single bit.
The actual channel bandwidth is obviously higher than that.
Yes you could likely design an optimized modulation scheme to do this, likely some kind of bird specific frequency shift keying. You can also do any kind of quadrature modulation in the audio spectrum (original dialup used acoustic modems).
This person just didn't do that in this case. It's still a very cool experiment by YouTube maker standards though.
My point is that it doesn’t have to be optimal to be considered digital. Which in the general case means basically any communication channel can be digital.
If the argument is that they didn’t correctly calculate the bandwidth, then sure.
You are not addressing my critique of your statement, just piling on a bunch of useless extra knowledge just so that you can feel superior.
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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 whole sequence is:
- Digitally synthesized spectrogram (lossless)
- Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
- Heard by the bird (analogue, lossy)
- Reproduced by the bird (analogue, lossy)
- Captured by an ADC as a digital audio signal (lossy)
- Spectrum-analysed to observe a similar (but corrupted) reproduction of the shape in the original spectrogram
To be transferring digital information, we would instead need to modulate and demodulate the digital signal (exactly like an old modem) so that the analogue corruption does not affect the digital signal:
- Image file (lossless)
- Bit stream (lossless)
- Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
- Heard by the bird (lossy)
- Reproduced by the bird (lossy)
- Demodulated to recover exact bit stream despite distortion (lossless again)
- Decode bit stream to recover original image file, bit-for-bit perfect
I extremely doubt that this bird is capable of 2MB/s. For reference that would make it 280+ times fast than dialup, and barely slower than ADSL. This setup is basically just using the bird instead of a telephone line.
- Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
- Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
These steps are literally the same thing. You’re converting some data into sound for the bird to hear.
Edit: Actually, most physical modulation schemes use sinusoids anyways. So that’s exactly the same as playing a spectrum.
Yes, the near-identical sentences (only drawing a distinction between the processes where one exists) would indicate that. The "heard by the bird" and "reproduced by the bird" steps were also the same. But this is necessary context to make clear the digital data ("bit-stream") that is being modulated into the signal.
It is far from "exactly the same". The similarity is only in that both go through the same analogue channel. The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly, while the spectrogram cannot.
The article title says they converted a PNG and the bird was able to "recall the file", and yet it produced an indisputably different file. That it looks vaguely the same to the cursory human observer does not make it the same file.
The entire point is that the modulated signal can be reconstructed exactly,
But this isn’t true. Just because a signal is modulated doesn’t mean it can’t be distorted.
A spectrogram is just showing that arbitrary data can be sent though this channel. It’s literally a form of modulation.
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Birds are totally organic organisms. Rightttttt. BIRDS ARENT REAL!!!!
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2MB/s / 16Mbps is enough for 4K HEVC video and audio. In theory you could encode a full movie with enough starlings.
A million monkeys on typewriters is old news. Now we're gonna teach a million starlings to play back the entire bee movie.
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We're finally getting tweets back
In before EU genocides all starlings because you can't put backdoors in them to scan for CSAM.
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Imagine the possibilities for piracy and secure messaging (provided that the birds don't snitch on you).
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I heard the Falcon service is the fastest.
?Fun? fact: In a steampunk world, birds would serve as CPUs. America experimented with using pigeons for bomb guidance. As it turned out, three birds pecking at an image had pretty good accuracy. They ultimately lost out to silicon, due to the size, maintenance, and training time.
Fun speculation: we are CPUs for the information systems we inhabit, like scientific method, political ideologies, etc.
There was an amusing short story about a guy who could do actual math in his head (I think it was by Asimov).
Edit: found it, it's "The Feeling Of Power" by Asimov.
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Hear me out! Bird factor authentication!
Please honk your seagull to unlock your ed25519-sk ssh key
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Send a raven.
Well of course NSA's spy device can store information. We've known this for decades
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