Spiders rely on touch to sense the world around them. Their bodies and legs are covered in tiny hairs that can distinguish between different kinds of noise.
Preying into a web makes a very different sound than a spider coming a-wooing or a breeze. A different tone is produced by each strand of the web.
A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of a spider's web into music, working with artist Tom and his team to create an interactive musical instrument.
The team added an interactive virtual reality component to allow people to enter and interact with the web.
The team says that this research will help them understand the three-dimensional architecture of a spider's web, and may even help us learn the language of spiders.
The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings, which make it sense of its world through different frequencies.
When you think of a spider's web, you most likely think of a flat, round web with radial spokes. Most spiderwebs are built in three dimensions, like sheet webs, tangle webs, and funnel webs.
To explore the structure of these kinds of webs, the team housed a tropical tent-web spider in a rectangular enclosure and waited for it to fill the space with a three-dimensional web. They used a sheet laser to illuminate and create high-definition images of 2D cross-sections of the web.
The 3D architecture of the web was pieced together from the 2D cross sections. Different sound frequencies were allocated to different strands to turn this into music. The notes were played in patterns based on the structure of the web.
They scanned a web while it was being spun and then created music out of it. As the structure of the web changes, the notes can change and the listener can hear the process of the construction.
A record of the step-by-step process will allow us to better understand how spiders build a 3D web without support structures, a skill that could be used for 3D printing.
Spider's Canvas allowed audiences to hear the spider music, but the virtual reality adds a whole new layer of experience, the researchers said.
The virtual reality environment is intriguing because your ears are going to pick up structural features that you might see but not immediately recognize.
You can start to understand the environment the spider lives in by hearing and seeing it at the same time.
Researchers can understand what happens when they mess with parts of the web in a virtual reality environment. The strand's tone changes as you stretch it. Break one and see how it affects the other strands.
This can help us understand why a spider's web is built the way it is.
The work allowed the team to develop an algorithm to identify the types of vibrations of a spider's web, which could be used to trap prey or another spider.
This is the beginning of the process of learning to speak a spider, at least a tropical tent-web spider.
Buehler said that they are trying to generate synthetic signals to speak the language of the spider.
Can we begin to communicate with them if we expose them to certain rhythms? Those are really exciting ideas.
The previous research was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
This article was published in April 2021.
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