MIT Researchers Want to Talk to Spiders - Gizmodo Australia

Arachnids use their intricate webs to trap meals, navigating across the structure using the vibrations it senses through the hairs on its legs.

To figure out the sounds of a spider web, they hosted a spider in their lab and laser-scanned the web it constructed in two-dimensional cross-sections.

“Spiders live in this vibrational universe… they live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can now access,” said paper co-author Markus Buehler, a materials scientist at MIT, in a phone call.

“One of the things we can do with this instrument with this approach is we can, for the first time, begin to feel a little bit like a spider or experience the world like the spider does.”.

The spider web project is larger (literally) than his previous work, which focused on translating proteins into musical compositions.

One recent project translated a key protein of the novel coronavirus into sound.

“Unlike a protein, where we have to follow the laws of quantum mechanics, a spider web follows Newtonian mechanics,” Buehler said.

They made their scans over the course of the web’s construction, shedding light on how the vibrations the spider senses take on different tones and timbres over time.

The team has produced a virtual reality program in which a viewer plays the spider and is able to “pluck” any component of the web to hear how sound resonates from it.

Otherwise, Buehler said, the sound would be cacophonous to the human ear.

Depending on your perspective, the song of the spider web may sound like wind chimes in the Twilight Zone or a bad bout of tinnitus.

(I’ve never been in proximity to Aragog or Shelob, but this sounds about as terrifying as I imagine a spider lair to be).

The longer-term aspiration is to be able to communicate with a spider on a web, Buehler said

“Spiders are silent, and the web itself is also something you don’t associate with sound,” Buehler said

“We’re trying to give the spider a voice…so that we can perhaps one day have a little chit chat with a spider, and maybe play a song together and jam together.”