2 HN users recommended this explainer2 months2025–2026score 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)
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.)
>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]
> 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
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