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I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

12 videos recommended on HN
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2 HN users recommended this explainer2 months2025–2026 score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN fans point to it as a fun, nerdy crossover of bird song acoustics and technology, and the story itself got its own thread.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

“you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of "saving" a PNG to a bird” (HN, 2026)

1 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 2 citations · Explainers

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@nucleardog Mar 2026 Recommends
on HN thread Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs
I'd easily believe that bird songs are vastly more complex and interesting than we currently understand! If you haven't seen it, you might enjoy Benn Jordan's video of "saving" a PNG to a bird: [this video] (Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)
Acoustics of bird songs with tech crossover

Citations, criticism and jokes

@alterom Jul 2025 Cites it
on HN thread I saved a PNG image to a bird
Read more
>I thought he'd transmit a PNG over a modem, get a bird to memorise that and play it back. That's essentially what he has done. Except he did the modulation/demodulation with audio software (and, technically, stored a monochrome bitmap , not a PNG). Dial-up modems encode data in audio-frequency. Later modems used phase-shift keying¹, but the very early ones used frequency-shift keying², which is essentially encoding data in a frequency graph - i.e., drawing a line in a spectrum analyzer. Drawing a bird in a spectrum analyzer is packing much more data than that; it's like playing several of those streams at once . The bird has shown itself to be capable of remembering and reproducing multiplexed frequency-keyed streams. >With enough birds I imagine you can store quite a bit of data. Takes saving to the cloud to another level. Literally a point made in the video³ at 18:34. ____________ ¹ [link] ² [link] ³ [this video]
Video makes the point about storing data in birds
@alterom Jul 2025 Cites it
on HN thread I saved a PNG image to a bird
> Time to teach all local birds the AACS key :) BTW, forgot to add: the video literally suggests that when they estimate how much data can be stored in birds. The visualization of the byte sequence coming out of the Bluetooth speaker [1] (at 18:36 -18:38) starts with the oh-so-familiar 09 F9 11 02 9D ... Ben is one step ahead of you :) [1] [this video]
Video visualizes byte sequence starting with the AACS key

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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