Someone Saved a Digital Image File to a Bird

Science and music YouTube creator Benn Jordan did something that sounds impossible: he saved a PNG image to a bird.

Despite this claim sounding entirely outrageous at first blush, it relies upon what everyone already knows about birds: they can make a dizzying array of sounds, and some of them are expert mimics.

Jordan, who admits he got “a bit concerningly obsessed with birds for a few months, goes into great detail about how different birds can make so many diverse sounds, both in terms of biology and their social structures.

While birds like parrots are perhaps most well-known for their ability to speak human language, albeit in a very different way than people, Jordan notes that songbirds have distinctly impressive control over pitch and speed thanks to their more sophisticated syrinx, an avian vocal organ. Some songbirds have more than a dozen tiny muscles that control their vocalizations.

Jordan recorded a lot of high-quality songbird calls and noticed that when they are slowed down so that amplitude and frequency modulations can be graphically observed, many interesting patterns emerge. It is also possible to turn pictures into sound waves, for example, making an illustration of a bird comprised of sound.

But then, what if a bird with impeccable control over its vocalizations and the ability to learn and mimic sounds heard this drawing of a bird? Could a bird “draw” a self-portrait? And if so, is this a form of biological memory? Is a bird that can vocalize the data it has heard like a living memory card?

Enter a male starling named, “The Mouth.” As Jordan explains, The Mouth was rescued by Sarah Tidwell, an incredibly talented artist and animal caretaker. The Mouth, in addition to being a beautiful bird, possesses remarkable abilities to learn new sounds.

Tidwell rescued The Mouth as a baby after he fell from an endangered nest and raised him, so he learned a lot of different sounds than a wild starling would, including one of his favorite sounds to make: the iPhone camera shutter click. As Jordan demonstrates with his ultrasonic recordings, The Mouth’s camera shutter sound is remarkably close to the original sound file.

While Jordan played his bird drawing sound for The Mouth, the bird did not appear to be that interested during their visit. However, when poring over his ultrasonic recordings back at home, Jordan spotted a sound that resembled his bird drawing, tucked away inside other vocalizations.

The Mouth did it — he recreated a picture of a bird using his voice.

“This little bird successfully learned and emulated the sound in the exact same frequency range that he heard it, essentially transferring 176 kilobytes of uncompressed information,” Jordan explains.

Image credits: Sarah Tidwell (@inkydragon) and Benn Jordan