Researchers say that research on converting spider nests into music will appear, and it will be possible to apply it to 3D printers and communicate with spiders.

Spiders can detect prey by the vibration transmitted from the thread when insects and small animals hit the nest, and can also hear the sound with fine hair instead of ears. By scanning such spider webs and converting them into music and understanding their three-dimensional structure and nesting process, an attempt was announced to use the secrets of spider webs in the field of engineering and interspecies communication.

Making music from spider webs | EurekAlert! Science News
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/acs-mmf032221.php

Making music from spider webs
https://phys.org/news/2021-04-music-spider-webs.html

Scientists Turned Spiderwebs Into Music, And It's Hauntingly Beautiful
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7e43y/scientists-turned-spiderwebs-into-music-and-its-hauntingly-beautiful

At ACS Spring 2021 , held by the American Chemical Society from April 5th to 30th, 2021, a total of about 9,000 presentations will be scheduled on scientific topics in a wide range of fields. Marcus Buehler, a materials engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced on April 12 that 'a study of scanning spider webs and converting them into music' is one of them. Mr. Buehler commented on the reason for his research, 'The structure of the spider's nest reminds me of a stringed instrument like a harp. So, I'm curious about what kind of music can be played by looking at the spider's thread as a string and modeling it physically. Has sprung up. '

To model the spider web, Buehler and colleagues first placed the tropical cyrtophora molucius in a rectangular case to nest, and then laser-scanned the nest to create a cross-section of the nest. Then, I created a three-dimensional model by superimposing cross-sectional views, assigned sound frequencies to the length of the thread and how to tie the thread, and created a sound pattern based on the structure of the nest.

In this way, the music that Mr. Buehler made from the spider web is as follows. When you play the movie, you can hear the melody created by using the structure of the cross section of the nest as a note and the structure in the three-dimensional direction as the time axis, that is, the progress of the score.

Spider web sonification: Less busy music, sonification of the porous web along y-axis --YouTube


'I think it sounds dissonant to the ears of unfamiliar people, but when you get used to the spider web, it becomes strangely familiar and you can hear it more naturally,' Buehler said. When I listen to music on my car stereo on my way home from a concert, it sounds strange. '

Attempts to make complex things understandable by sound, such as this research, are called sonifications , likened to visualizations that make data into easy-to-understand graphs. 'Sonification was the best choice for digitizing the structure of spider nests,' said Buehler, because spiders rely on sound and vibration to recognize their surroundings.

Buehler and colleagues have also developed a system that reproduces the structure of a spider's nest with VR technology and allows you to experience 'what happens when you listen to music that sonifies a spider's nest from a spider's perspective.'

Spider web sonification: Virtual Reality (VR) explorations --YouTube


By modeling the spider web, Buehler believes that not only can we make mysterious music, but we can also apply it in the field of engineering. 'By understanding the temporal order of how spider nests are created by sound, we may be able to develop a 3D printer that refers to spider nests. When printing things with a 3D printer, We need a support material to support the model, because spiders can print a three-dimensional nest without using a support material, 'Buhler explained.

Buehler's research team is currently undertaking research to record the sounds that spiders make during nesting, courtship dance, and communication between spiders, and classify them using machine learning algorithms. 'I think that if you give a spider a pattern of rhythm or vibration, you can influence the behavior of the spider and communicate with it,' Buehler said. This is a very exciting idea. I said.