MIT researchers have created 3D models of spiderwebs to help transform the web’s vibrations into sounds that humans can hear, writes Angela Moore for Reuters. “Spiders utilize vibrations as a way to communicate with the environment, with other spiders,” says Prof. Markus Buehler. “We have recorded these vibrations from spiders and used artificial intelligence to learn these vibrational patterns and associate them with certain actions, basically learning the spider’s language.”
In a new data sonification project, a team of MIT researchers have translated the vibrations of a spider’s web into music, writes Maddie Bender for Motherboard. The team "used the physics of spiderwebs to assign audible tones to a given string’s unique tension and vibration," writes Bender. "Summing up every string’s tone created an interactive model of a web that could produce sound through manipulation or VR navigation."
A team of MIT researchers have translated the vibrations of a spider’s web into music, reports Isaac Schultz for Gizmodo. “Spiders live in this vibrational universe,” says Prof. Markus Buehler. “They live in this world of vibrations and frequencies, which we can now access. 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.”
Forbes contributor Andrea Morris spotlights how MIT researchers have created a virtual reality experience that allows people to experience a spider web’s vibrations as music. "The team is working on a study exploring the boundaries between the kinds of compositions we humans create from synthetic instruments and our own conventional tuning, and compositions created from instruments that have been crafted and tuned by other biological beings, like spiders," writes Morris.
Researchers at MIT and North Carolina State University have designed a membrane that can effectively muffle low-frequency sounds, writes Daniel Akst for The Wall Street Journal. The researchers believe that the membrane could be used to make airplane cabins quieter, Akst explains.