Simon Willison links to an idea that I immediately fell in love with, and will obviously never use. But that someone has done it makes me somehow happier.
I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird. Benn Jordan provides one of the all time great YouTube video titles, and it’s justified. He drew an image in an audio spectrogram, played that sound to a talented starling (internet celebrity “The Mouth”) and recorded the result that the starling almost perfectly imitated back to him.
Benn himself further says:
Hypothetically, if this were an audible file transfer protocol that used a 10:1 data compression ratio, that’s nearly 2 megabytes of information per second. While there are a lot of caveats and limitations there, the fact that you could set up a speaker in your yard and conceivably store any amount of data in songbirds is crazy.