Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have turned spider webs into music -- creating a soundtrack that could help them better understand how the arachnids spin their complex creations and even how they communicate.
The MIT team worked with Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno to take two-dimensional laser scans of a spider web, which were stitched together and converted into a mathematical model to recreate the web in 3D in virtual reality. They also worked with MIT's music department to create the harplike virtual instrument.
"The web has a lot of internal structures and you can visualize and look at them, but it's really hard for the human imagination or human brain to understand all these structural details," said MIT engineering professor Markus Buehler, who presented the work on Monday at a virtual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
"Listening to the music while moving through the VR spider web lets you see and hear these structural changes and gives a better idea of how spiders see the world".
"Spiders have vibrational sensors, they use vibrations as a way to orient themselves, to communicate with other spiders".
"Spiders are able to build their webs without scaffolding or supports, so having a better idea of how they work could lead to the development of advanced new 3D printing techniques!", Buehler said.
They scanned the web while the spider was building it and Buehler compared it to a stringed instrument that changes as the structure becomes more complex.
"While you're playing the guitar, suddenly you're going to have new strings appear and emerge and grow," he said.
Buehler said they recorded the vibrations spiders create during different activities and are using artificial intelligence to create synthetic versions.
"We're beginning to perhaps be able to speak the language of a spider," he said. "The hope is that we can then play the vibrations back to the web structure to communicate with the spider and perhaps induce the spider to act in a certain way, to respond to the signals in a certain way."
He said that work is still in progress and that they've had to shut down their lab because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Buehler has been interested in the connection between music and materials on the molecular level for years and has used similar techniques to show the subtle differences between the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and between two different variants of the Covid-19 virus.
In addition to the scientific value, Buehler said the webs are musically interesting and that you can hear the melodies the spider creates during construction.
"It's unusual and eerie and scary, but ultimately beautiful," he said.
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Article from CNN (edited)
