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I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird

Benn Jordan · 2.1M views · 2025-07-26 · 30:53

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2025–2026

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What people said

junon · 2025-12 · Strong recommendation

I love Benn Jordan. If you liked this one, go check out the one where he stores a JPEG inside of a living bird. [VIDEO]

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nucleardog · 2026-03 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO] (Besides the hook-y title, some interesting info on the acoustics of bird songs with some cross-over into tech.)

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alterom · 2025-07 · Reference

>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 [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Benn Jordan, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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