Microsoft plans to preserve music for 10,000 years with glass
A new vault for music could protect one of our greatest art forms for future generations. This is Microsoft 's plan to achieve it.
by ErickPeraza
June 03, 2022 12:15 p.m.
Tech company plans to preserve music for 10,000 years with glass
Nothing is forever. According to Microsoft 's estimate , hard drives protect data for five years before they fail.
Tape lasts about a decade, while CDs and DVDs can last up to 15 years before their content risks becoming unreadable.
While it seems we live in an age of progress, the iPhone can store thousands of songs in your pocket and stream countless more from the cloud, even in the best of circumstances those songs will deteriorate millennia before the hieroglyphs carved in stone by the ancients. Egyptians.
This is the core challenge behind Global Music Vault. Located in Norway, it is part of a cold storage facility drilled into the same mountain as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
The Arctic Vault seeks to preserve content and technology for future generations.
While the seed vault protects the earth's cache of seeds, the Global Music Vault aims to preserve the sound arts for generations to come.
“Here, irreplaceable master music files and music data must be preserved in music capsules, protected in the vault, and remembered for eternity,” the company explains.
Technically, a venture called Elire Group is overseeing the vault, while a partnership with Microsoft is testing a new glass-based storage medium to make this vision possible.
While seeds are biological organisms, evolving over billions of years to protect their DNA, our man-made storage solutions are far more delicate.
A single blow from a magnet can wipe a hard drive clean, while a CD's plastic coating can simply rot away.
Nowhere was the fragility of our recordings more clear than in 2008, when a fire swept through a Universal Studios Hollywood backlot, destroying as many as 175,000 master recordings.
Microsoft advances in cloud storage
As Microsoft has moved more and more of its business to the cloud, the company has been investigating more reliable and information-dense ways to store data than on hard drives.
(After all, the cloud is just a bunch of servers, and servers are full of hard drives that usually crash.)
One such solution that the company has developed is now being tested with Global Music Vault. Dubbed Project Silica, it could oversimplify the technology as something akin to a glass hard drive that reads like a CD.
It's a 3-by-3-inch platter that can hold 100GB of digital data, or roughly 20,000 songs, practically forever.
Microsoft starts with quartz glass, a high-quality glass that features a symmetrical molecular structure, making it much more resistant to high temperatures and pressures than the glass in your home windows (and, like all glass, immune to to the electromagnetic encoding of nuclear weapons).
Then, using a femtosecond laser, a laser that can be fired for a billionth of a second, Microsoft etches information as 3D patterns into the glass.
Once this data is stored, another laser reads the quartz, as machine learning algorithms convert the pattern into music, movies, or any other digital information.
"The goal is to be able to store cloud-scale archival and preservation data in glass," says Ant Rowstron, distinguished engineer and deputy lab manager at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
That's a business goal for Microsoft, but also a practical goal to protect the future of music and other data.
I imagine this vision as something like an Internet that is immune to digital rot.
The hope is that Project Silica will eventually be able to store "tens of petabytes" of music a year (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes and a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes), while Microsoft estimates its platters can last up to 10,000 years.
At this time, Global Music Vault has not committed to exclusively using Microsoft technology.
It is running a proof of concept, which appears to be more of a promotional and fundraising measure than a functional test, by placing plates in its storage with recordings from the Polar Music Prize, the National Library of New Zealand , and the International Library of African Music. .
Alongside them, mixed-media musician Beatie Wolfe will include a small selection of tracks, including From Green to Red, which she wrote as a teenager in response to the climate crisis.
As Wolfe explains, the vault feels appropriate given the uncertainty of our environmental and political future, but its very permanence also addresses the more practical concerns of musicians around the world, who feel devalued in the Internet age and fear that their contributions vanish.
"I think the music industry really created a worthless appreciation of music," says Wolfe.
“Music has become so devalued in this age of streaming, even more than in the age of iTunes, and the music industry has become so focused on commodifying this art form, that having a project like this reminds us of the value long-term of music for our species".
"Really preserving that is very much in line with what I believe in."