The spider’s world is one of vibration. Essentially blind, the web-building spider creates an image of the world through the vibrations it sends and receives through the web, which also functions as an organic and specialised instrument for transmitting these seismic signals. The spider/web is thus considered a material extension of the spider’s own senses, and—some argue—of its mind. The study of the seismic signals produced and received by the spider fall under the relatively new scientific discipline of biotremology: the study of vibrational communication in animals.
The Spider/Web Research Group’s research into biotremology extends Saraceno’s interest in exploring the possibilities for interspecific communication, and our capacity to communicate with our nonhuman kin, through practices of attuning to and producing vibrational signals. This strand of research is led by in-house Spider/Web Research Group researcher Roland Mühlethaler, and through collaborations with biotremology experts Hannelore Hoch and Andreas Wessel (Museum of Natural History, Berlin), as well as Peggy Hill (University of Tulsa).
This thread of biotremological research began in 2013 after Saraceno first came into contact with Mühlethaler (then a researcher at the Museum of Natural History Berlin), Hoch and Wessel ’s research into vibrational communications in insects - a meeting mediated by Saraceno’s visiting research colleague, arachnologist Yael Lubin. Following this, Hoch and Mühlethaler returned to Saraceno’s studio with a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (PDV-100), which they used to measure the vibrational signal propagation in a planar Nephila web and the bouncing signals produced by a Cyrtophora spider in its (modified orb) tent web. From this first visit, a mutual collaboration and interest in spider vibrational communication was born, which led to Mühlethaler eventually taking up a position within Saraceno’s Spider/Web Research Group, heading up the bioacoustic experimental research program.
VIBRATION: Plucking
Spider silk can vibrate at a wide range of frequencies. When the spider ‘plucks’ the silk strands of the web it creates ripples in every direction, longitudinal vibrational waves that the spider can feel in each of its eight legs. By plucking the web, the spider can receive important information about the condition of the web, or the location of prey, for instance. Plucking can also be a courtship signal: a male spider gently plucking the threads of a female spider’s web as he approaches, to indicate his intent to mate.
VIBRATION: Tuning
From time to time - when the web’s integrity is compromised, or when other environmental factors (such as humidity, etc.) alter the properties of the web - the spider will ‘tune’ its web to maintain its signalling capabilities. In this ‘tuning’ process, the spider will carefully adjust the threads to maintain and modulate the tension of the web, therefore preserving the web’s capacity to carry vibrational messages. This process of “tuning” is also a generative way to think of the spider web is as a multi-stringed instrument - a harp with thousands of strings, all in tension with one another - and the spider as a skilled musician, using its eight legs to pluck and strum this web instrument to better attune to the vibrational signals it carries and resounds, which relay information to the spider about the world.
VIBRATION: Tremulation
Tremulation is one of the most ubiquitous types of spider vibrational behaviours, understood as trembling, shaking or jerking body movements which produce vibrations - which, for the spider, might include bouncing up and down on the web, producing transverse vibrational waves. Spider tremulation tends to produce substrate-borne vibrations in lower frequencies (in the range of 1-300 Hz, Hill & Wessel 2014).
PERCUSSION / DRUMMING
Percussive signals are produced when a spider drums its body parts (usually its legs and pedipalps) against a substrate, such as a dry bed of leaves.Such drumming signals are usually used as a vibrational courtship communication between potential mates.
STRIDULATION
Stridulation occurs when the spider rubs two rigid body parts against each other. Stridulatory organs have been described for a number of spider species, but few sound recordings exist. Stridulation signals have been documented in a range of spiders, where the signals seems to act in intraspecies communication.
TESTING THE WEB INTEGRITY
For the web-building spider, the web is a finely tuned instrument; the spider relies on the tensions of the thread to communicate vibrational signals to it. The spider will also send vibrations through the web structure, which will tell the spider if there is a deformation in the web - perhaps as a result of a collision incident, or whether threads have perhaps been loosened by the wind.
SPIDER WEB BUILDING VIBRATIONS
Spiders carefully build their webs using different types of spider silk, allowing the spider to control the web’s architecture, tension and stiffness, all of which affect how signals travel through the web. As the spider builds and tunes its silken musical instrument, it also produces vibrations.
SPIDER EATING VIBRATIONS
When web-building spiders catch, wrap and devour their prey, they produce vibrations that travel through the threads of the web
SPIDER COURTSHIP SIGNALS
In spider courtship rituals, usually a male spider will send a signal to a female spider to test her receptivity to mating - which could be either a drumming signal, or a repertoire of plucking and stridulation signals - using the main threads of the female spider’s web (radial threads in the case of an orb web).
DEFENSIVE SIGNALS
Spiders can also send defensive signals - to members of the same, or other species, including the defensive stridulation sounds produced by tarantula spiders.
TERRITORIAL SIGNALS
Both web-building and non web-building spiders send territorial vibrational signals - which are usually intra-specific signals - that is, signals to members of their own species. These signals might be sent by males competing for mateship rights, including ‘jamming signals’ that male spiders will send to disrupt the courtship signal of another male.
SOCIAL SIGNALS
Of the 48,127 known species of spider, there are only 25 known species that exhibit some degree of sociality. The degree of social or cooperative behaviour varies, and sociality is usually differentiated between colonial spiders and cooperative or ‘permanently social’ spiders. Social spiders use intraspecific signals to communicate with one another, whether in a shared web, or within a colony of webs.
MIMICKING SIGNALS
Some spiders will also mimic the vibratory signals sent by their prey - insects such as leafhoppers or even other spiders. An example is the jumping spider Portia fimbriata, who will mimic the mating vibratory signals of, for instance, Euryattus sp. Spiders. When the Euryattus spider responds to this signal, she is greeted not by a potential mate, but by the Portia predator.
ARACHNID ORCHESTRA. JAM SESSION #1 WITH BRIAN O’REILLY, SINGAPORE CCA
As part of Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), NTU Singapore in 2015 curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Anca Rujoiu, Saraceno invited a number of musicians and performers to enter into an acoustic dialogue with spider/webs, mediated through the instruments of his Arachnid Orchestra. These encounters took the shape of three Jam Sessions. Jam Session #1 was with Brian O’Reilly, performing with a number of instruments which offered different ways of interacting with the sounds generated by the spider.
SPIDER SALON, STUDIO RECORDING WITH EVAN ZIPORYN
Head of Music and Theater Arts, inaugural Director of the Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) and clarinettist/composer Evan Ziporyn visited Studio Tomás Saraceno in Rummelsburg, Berlin in September 2015, to speak about spiders, art and the musical possibilities that resonate in and between spiders, webs, silk and humans. During this visit, Ziporyn engaged in an interspecies jam session with a duet of vibrating Cyrtophora citricola spiders in their shared, complex three-dimensional tent web. This encounter is described in the book: Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions (2017)
SPIDER SALON JAM SESSION WITH TOMOMI ADACHI
In September 2016, An early Spider Salon initiated in Tomás Saraceno’s Berlin studio, Berlin-based vocalist and composer Tomomi Adachi - renowned for his improvised music with voice, live electronics and self-made instruments - was invited to imagine an acoustic interspecies dialogue with a chorus of Cyrtophora citricola spiders, a Nephila senegalensis spider, and a percussive ensemble of Lycosidae spiders.
SPIDER SALON, HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT, BERLIN
A Spider Salon with Tomás Saraceno and Molly Nesbit in an encounter with an Eratigena atrica (Tegenaria atrica) spider in a sonified web in an open carbon frame. This Spider Salon took place at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2014, as part of the event, ‘'A Matter Theater' (2014).
COSMIC JIVE THE SPIDER SESSIONS, VILLA CROCE (IT)
The result of a long-term collaboration with biologists, musicians, architects and electronic engineers to study the sounds and vibrations produced by spiders in their web, Cosmic Jive The Spider Sessions was a solo exhibition by Tomás Saraceno in 2014 at Villa Croce, Italy. For this exhibition, Saraceo developed early prototypes of the spider web sonification devices: highly sensitive piezo microphones that could pick up the vibrations that Nephila keniensis and Cyrtophora citricola spiders send and receive through their webs.
ARACHNID ORCHESTRA. JAM SESSION #3 WITH JOYCE BEETUAN KOH AND ETIENNE TURPIN, SINGAPORE CCA
As part of Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), NTU Singapore in 2015 curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Anca Rujoiu, Saraceno invited a number of musicians and performers to enter into an acoustic dialogue with spider/webs, mediated through the instruments of his Arachnid Orchestra. These encounters took the shape of three Jam Sessions. Jam Session #3: Away We Go was developed collaboratively by musician Joyce Betuan Koh and philosopher Etienne Turpin.
ARACHNID ORCHESTRA. JAM SESSION #2 WITH BANI HAYKAL, SINGAPORE CCA
As part of Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), NTU Singapore in 2015 curated by Ute Meta Bauer and Anca Rujoiu, Saraceno invited a number of musicians and performers to enter into an acoustic dialogue with spider/webs, mediated through the instruments of his Arachnid Orchestra. These encounters took the shape of three Jam Sessions. Jam Session #2: Variations on Hello was performed by musician Bani Haykal. Introduced by arachnologist Joseph K. H. Koh, Jam Session #1 incorporated a set of materials to transmit vibrations to the spiders, in an attempt to investigate whether specific frequencies and rhythmic patterns would trigger a response and produce a feedback mechanism between spiders and humans.
SPIDER JAM SESSION WITH SILVIA BOLOGNESI, MILAN (IT)
On the occasion of Tomás Saraceno's the Weaving The Cosmos hosted by Bulgari at Ulrico Hoepli's Planetarium during the 2019 Milan Design Week, music performer Silvia Bolognesi was invited to participate to a jam session with the spiders/webs. Silvia Bolognesi is a double bass virtuoso and is considered as one of the most daring and interesting personalities of the Italian jazz scene. Her improvisation skills enter in dialogue with the spider/webs, transforming the installation into a collective musical instrument through which terrestrial and interplanetary tremors resound.
In 2014 Saraceno initiated a series of experimental platforms for musical encounters between humans and spiders—interspecies jam sessions that experiment with vibration as a transductive force, capable of moving between the sensory Umwelten of anthropos and arachnid. Using the sonified spider/web as the core instrument, these jam sessions have fielded musical encounters between numerous human and arachnid performers.
These encounters became the basis for Tomás Saraceno’s evolving ensemble of musical instruments that experiment with the capacity of the spider/web to transmit acoustic signals in the form of vibrations. First exhibited in 2015 at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, this Arachnid Orchestra includes a range of spider silk instruments representing the different sections of a traditional orchestra: string, percussion and wind. These instruments incorporate the Studio’s customized piezo devices that translate web-based vibrations to audible frequencies in the human range, and, in turn, make human acoustic signals sensible to the spider/web. Presented here is an album of these musical interspecies encounters, featuring jam sessions between spiders and humans performed live in the exhibition, and recordings produced in Saraceno’s studio in Berlin.
These sounds - including one-off concerts, jams and scientific recordings, form part of a novel multispecies biotremological archive, including human and arachnid dialogues mediated by instruments Saraceno has created from spider/webs. A material resource for scientific research, this archive is also an invitation for further experimentation.
Through this relay of human-spider signalling, Studio Saraceno has composed a novel experimental platform for mediating interspecific communication: entangling the worlds of spider/webs and humans—but also multiple disciplines of thought and experimentation.
Vibrational (biotremological) communication is ubiquitous; to paraphrase Einstein, “everything in life is vibration!” However, a large part of these biotremological signals are not something that we perceive. With respect to the spider, many of their vibrational signals are not ‘sounds’ - they are felt, rather than heard by the spider, who does not possess ears as we understand them. In contrast to cicada and cricket songs that we can easily hear without technical mediation, spider/web vibrations are largely inaudible to human ears; an imperceptible dialogue in patterns seemingly unknowable to us. These signals can only be recorded on the substrate on which they are borne.
Over the last decade, with the Spider/Web Research Group and extended team, Saraceno has developed specialised web sonification and signalling devices that unveil the hidden musicality of the spider/web.. Drawing from fields of biotremology (the study of animal vibrational communication) and biomateriomics (the functional studies of biological materials such as spider silk) and based on the principle of piezoelectric effects, the specialised devices developed by the studio—Feelers and Buzzers— allow us to participate in a previously inaudible vibrational dialogue with a high degree of sensitivity.
Each Feeler includes a customised electronic preamplifier and a modified piezo sensor that detects pressure variations produced by sound waves. The circuit board used in the preamps is designed to amplify very small pressure variations, providing greater sensitivity to the subtle vibrations travelling through the spider/web. To allow more intimate contact with the web with minimal disruption of its architecture, the piezo sensor element was extended using fishing wire, allowing greater proximity to the radial threads of the orb web along which vibrations are most ably transmitted.
The piezoelectric Buzzers developed by the studio are devices for audio signalling, driven by an oscillating electronic circuit or another audio signal source. A wire attached to the piezo device allows signals generated from the piezo-disc to be transmitted to another substrate (in this case, the spider/web). In effect, this device allows sounds—such as those produced by musicians—to be transformed into vibrational signals, which can then be translated back into the spider/web allowing us to ‘play’ and compose with spider musicians.
Feeler B + Piezo Amp 5534 SMD
First generation web sonification device
Year: 2014
Species recorded: Nephila genus; Cyrtophora genus; Eratigena genus
Technical setup: Custom-built piezo sensors connected to radial threads of spider web; raw signals amplified by a
custom-built piezo preamp
Collaborative team: Studio Tomás Saraceno with FRGMNT (Jo Grys) and Odysseus Klissouras
Musical outputs: Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions album (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Italy)
Feeler C + Piezo Amp TL071 SMD
Second generation web sonification device
Year: 2015
Species recorded: Nephila genus; Cyrtophora genus; Eratigena genus; Pholcus genus
Modifications: Modified piezo preamp, modified feeler design
Collaborative team: Studio Tomás Saraceno with FRGMNT (Jo Grys) and Odysseus Klissouras
Musical outputs: STS Spider Salon (Rummelsburg Berlin, with Tomomi Adachi, Evan Ziporyn, David Rothenberg); Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions performances and album (CCA Singapore, with Brian Massumi, Brian O’Reilly, Bani Haykal, Etienne Turpin & Joyce Beetuan Koh)
Feeler D + Piezo Amp NGLMNN
Third generation web sonification device
Year: 2017
Species recorded: Nephila genus; Cyrtophora genus; Eratigena genus; Pholcus genus
Modifications: New custom-built piezo preamp; modified feeler design
Collaborative team: Studio Tomás Saraceno (Dominik Hildebrand) with NGLMNN (Constantin Engelmann)
Musical outputs: Cosmic Dust Spider Web Orchestra (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, México); Biennale Lyon
Feeler E + Piezo Amp NGLMNN
Fourth generation web sonification device
Year: 2018
Species recorded: Nephila genus; Holocnemus genus; Pholcus genus
Modifications: Modified piezo sensor, extended using fishing wire
Collaborative team: Studio Tomás Saraceno (Dominik Hildebrand) with NGLMNN (Constantin Engelmann)
Musical outputs: Voices Collide, performances (Palais de Tokyo, Paris with Eliane Radigue, Alvin Lucier and Evan Ziporyn)
Buzzer B
First generation spider communicator
Year: 2014
Played to Species: Nephila genus; Cyrtophora genus; Eratigena genus
Technical set-up: Custom-built piezo buzzer connected to radial threads of spider web; raw signals filtered according to spider frequency range (software based)
Collaborative team: Studio Tomás Saraceno with Odysseus Klissouras
Musical outputs: Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions album (Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Italy)
Buzzer C
Second generation spider communicator
Year: 2015
Played to Species: Nephila genus; Cyrtophora genus; Eratigena genus; Pholcus genus
Technical set-up: Optimized custom-built piezo buzzer connected to radial threads of spider web; raw signals filtered according to spider frequency range (software based)
Collaborative team: Studio Tomás Saraceno with Odysseus Klissouras
Musical outputs: STS Spider Salon (Rummelsburg Berlin, with Tomomi Adachi, Evan Ziporyn, David Rothenberg); Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions performances and album (CCA Singapore, with Brian Massumi, Brian O’Reilly, Bani Haykal, Etienne Turpin & Joyce Beetuan Koh); Cosmic Dust Spider Web Orchestra (Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, México); Biennale Lyon
In December 2018, entomologist and specialist in biotremology at Studio Tomás Saraceno, Dr Roland Mühlethaler, held a public workshop at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in the context of Tomás Saraceno’s carte blanche solo exhibition, ON AIR. In this workshop, participants learned how to make an invertebrate recording box - which would allow them to listen to the vibrational signals produced by spiders or other insects - using simple materials and a smartphone.
Using simple tools, you can build an Invertebrate Recording Box that allows you to listen to the substrate-borne vibrations produced by spiders, leafhoppers, or even snails. These are vibrations which are normally not audible to humans.
BiPi - Biotremology Pickup Device
Instructions and kit developed by Dr Roland Mühlethaler
Materials needed:
Tin can (and plastic lid)
Sheet of cuttable foam
USB plug
Power cable
Recessed socket
Cable holder
Preamplifier
Piezo-disc
Audio cable
Audio plug
Powerbank
Drawing paper
Glue
Instructions:
Cut out the bottom of an empty peanut can, and turn it upside down.
Cut out a piece of foam in a circular shape. The foam needs to fit inside the can, but doesn´t necessarily need to fill the whole space.
Glue the piece of foam on the inside part of the can’s plastic lid. This lid should now be attached to the bottom of the can, so that you close the can with the lid.
Cut out a circular piece of transparent drawing paper. This will be later glued inside the can, covering the foam, preamplifier and the piezo disc.
Glue the piezo disc to the drawing paper.
Poke or drill two holes in the lower half of the side of the can, which are large enough to accommodate the cable holder.
Place the cable holder and the recessed socket inside the holes.
Connect the unfixed end of the power cable with an USB plug.
Place the preamplifier on the foam inside the can.
Thread the power cable through the cable holder, so that it reaches inside the can.
Connect the recessed socket, the power cable and the piezo disc to the preamplifier. Make sure that the red cables connect to the parts marked with also with red:
Glue the drawing paper inside the can at mid height so it covers all that is inside.
Connect the power cable to the power bank.
Plug the audio cable into the recessed socket.
Connect the other end of the audio cable to the pink socket of the audio plug. Connect your headphones to the green socket of the audio plug. Then, connect the end of the audio plug to your phone.
To use your invertebrate recording box, carefully place your spider, insect (or snail!) on the drawing paper inside the can, and loosely cover the can with cling film. Now you are ready to tune in to the insect vibrations! Enjoy listening to the sounds of the spider and don’t forget to set it free afterwards.