The chirp of the cicada, the sound of many summers, has received an electronic upgrade that turns the insects into cyborg loudspeakers playing anything from Pachelbel’s Canon to the theme from Top Gun. The researchers behind the work say it could be used to spread warning messages during an emergency.
Naoto Nishida and his colleagues at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, were inspired by previous research in which cockroaches were remote-controlled by electrodes that triggered muscle movement. Nishida says that, while sitting in their woodland campus and hearing cicadas chirping nearby, the researchers decided to “borrow their chirp” using a similar approach.
Cicadas make noise with organs called timbals that have thick ribs joined by thin membranes that, when flexed, create a click. Doing this hundreds of times a second creates a continuous noise, with the pitch determined by the frequency of the flexes.
To take control of the timbals, the researchers implanted electrodes into seven large brown cicadas (Graptopsaltria nigrofuscata) and used signals from a computer passed through an amplifier to induce noises at precisely controlled pitches.
The team was eventually able to induce the cicadas to accurately play music, with the insects capable of reproducing tones over more than three octaves, from a musical note A at 27.5 hertz to a C at 261.6 hertz.
Nishida, who is now at the University of Tokyo, says the animals were relatively unharmed by the experiments and some were released back into the wild. “Some of them wanted to run away,” he says. “Some of them were like ‘OK, use my abdomen’.”
The team claims in its paper that cyborg insects could be used in emergency situations such as earthquakes, where they could be more energy-efficient, durable and agile than electronic robots.
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