Spider Web With Water Droplets

THE MUSIC OF SPIDERWEBS

Sofia M. Sofia M.

I've previously covered the intelligence of elephants to understand and react to music, further supporting the notion that music is quite the universal language, cross species. What if I told you that this no only applies to other animals, but smaller creatures as well, say arachnids. In a stunning advancement in attempting to communicate and understand species other than ours, scientists at MIT have translated the patterns of spiderwebs, into music.

Spider Web in between branches

Spiders are quite the intriguing creature and don't see the world in the same way that us humans do. Grant they are much smaller that we are, I'm referring to their lack of sight that is compensated by their hypersensitive sense of touch. Spiders rely on tiny hairs that encompass the majority of their bodies and legs to familiarize themselves with their environments. In addition, the webs they weave to catch prey compliments their powerful sense of touch as spiders are able to differentiate visitors on their webs based on the different vibrations produced on the web. So a spider would be able to tell if an unfortunate fly got caught or another fellow spider had come for a visit.

Given a spider's reliance on their sense of touch and advanced perception of vibrations, scientists reasoned that it would be possible to understand how to spiders communicate with each other if we could understand the vibrations produced in their webs. According to head scientist of the scientific endeavor Markus Buehler, "The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings, they sense their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies." While the frequencies on these webs are felt by the spider, scientists scanned the webs with lasers, translated them into a two-dimensional image, created a three-dimensional network of webs and then assigned sound frequencies to different strands to create a full "musical piece". I didn't know what to expect when listening to these spider web frequencies, but I couldn't have imaged that it would sound like that. In short, it sounds like something straight out of a nightmare. Feel free to check it out here, but fair warning that it is really odd.

If you checked it out, kind of creepy right? If you have a virtual reality system, you'd be able to really immerse yourself in a spider's world. The scientists created a VR program based on their findings called Spider's Canvas, which allows people to not only hear the music of spider vibrations but to also interact with the web strands to help people better understand how spiders see the world. 

 

With these advances in their studies, scientists have been able to characterize certain vibrations into different categories such as wind, prey and fellow spider. Scientists are hoping that this sparks the development of communication with spiders, which is really an interesting prospect.
 
Buehler also believes that it would be really interesting to see if this "spider music" could be the groundwork for a new genre of music, stating that "webs could be a new source for musical inspiration that is very different from the usual human experience." It's no surprising to hear Buehler talking about music in science like this, as he's known to be very invested in incorporating music into science. He's used similar technologies in the sonification of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines to show the subtle difference between the two. He also did the same thing with two COVID-19 variants.
 
I think the idea that music is the universal language is such an interesting concept and the ways that us humans continue to extend the meaning behind that claim is really quite amazing. I wonder how far we will come in communication with spiders and what other animals we may be able to talk to with the power of music.

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