TECH NEWS – This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “sending your data to the cloud…”

Benn Jordan, a musician and acoustic scientist on YouTube, just posted a video showing off the world’s most delightful—though not exactly practical—data storage solution: a European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). This songbird is renowned for its incredibly sophisticated mimicry. Thanks to its advanced syrinx, starlings can produce multiple sounds simultaneously, accurately and quickly. As a result, they can imitate nearly any sound: camera shutters, echo effects, countless synthetic and man-made noises. They can even ‘create’ PNG files.

Jordan’s video is a detailed look at how he hand-built an ultrasonic microphone for recording and collecting bird sounds. But in the second half (around the 13:30 mark), he explains how he decided—on a whim—to try turning a starling into a portable image drive. Using a spectral synthesizer (software that lets you draw spectrograms—visual representations of how a signal’s frequencies change over time—to create sound), he drew a bird and played that sound for a starling. Incredibly, the bird mimicked the sound so faithfully that the original drawing was visible in the spectrogram of its call.

“This little bird successfully learned and reproduced the sound in exactly the same frequency range it heard it, effectively transmitting about 176 kilobytes of uncompressed data. In theory, if this were an audio file transfer protocol with 10:1 compression, that would be nearly 2 megabytes per second,” Jordan said.

Granted, SATA 3 SSDs write at over 500 MB/s (typically 550 MB/s; for faster you’ll need NVMe drives) and can’t fly away. So, birds probably aren’t the most efficient data storage solution. But who cares? No SSD has ever put on a concert! (Well, except when they die at night and you discover it in the morning…)

Source: PCGamer