Microsoft to Archive Music on Futuristic Slivers of Glass That Will Live 10,000 Years – Singularity Hub

War, disease, divisionthings arent looking too rosy for humanity at the moment. But thanks to Microsoft, at least well be listening to Stevie Wonder after the apocalypse. The tech giant is partnering with Elire Group to etch the worlds music onto glass plates, and bury them in a remote arctic mountainside to ride out the end of the world.

The Global Music Vault will share space with the Global Seed Vault (better known as the Doomsday Vault) in Svalbard, Norway. The Doomsday Vault houses the largest collection of agricultural seeds on the planet. The Global Music Vault aims to match its neighbor seed for song.

Whereas seeds are prepackaged, music is not. So if eternity is the goal, whats the best medium for the job? Your laptop or smartphone wont do. Hard drives last about five years before they start to fail; tape is good for no more than 10 years; and CDs and DVDs last 15 years.

Microsoft was already working on a long-term storage solutiona technology critical for purposes beyond musicknown as Project Silica, when they partnered with Elire. The team can encode music with super-fast laser pulses that etch 3D nanoscale patterns into thin three-inch quartz glass wafers. Each wafer holds 100 gigabytes of music, or a little over 2,000 songs. They may soon hold a terabyte and eventually 10 terabytes or more. To retrieve the data, the team shines polarized light through the glass, and a machine learning algorithm translates the patterns it picks up in the glass back into music.

Now, about eternity.

The plates can survive baking, boiling, scouring, flooding, and electromagnetic pulses. (No word on shattering or zombies.) Microsoft estimates the plates, and the data they house, can live up to 10,000 years. The goal is to be able to store archival and preservation data at cloud scale in glass, Ant Rowstron, distinguished engineer and deputy lab director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, toldFast Company.

The Global Music Vault proof-of-concept glass plate, to be deposited in 2023, will include recordings from the International Library of African Music, Kenyas Ketebul Music archive, and Lebanons Fayha Choir. It will also feature Patti Smith and Paul Simon interviews, Manfred Mann and Stevie Wonder concerts, and works by singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe.

In an age wheremusic hasbecome increasinglydisposable anddevalued, thisis awonderful reminderof itslong-term valuefor humanity, Wolfe told Billboard.

The Global Music Vault isnt yet committed to using Microsofts glass, however. Theyve also experimented with other tech, like high-density QR codes on durable optical film. Future options for archival storage may even include DNAwhich Microsoft, among others, is also looking intobecause lifes source code offers incredibly high-density storage that can survive thousands of years at low temperatures.

Of course, if the world ends, we may not have the technologylike high-power computing and machine learningto unlock the vault for a long time. But despite doomsday nicknames for storage libraries like this, its not just the end of the world motivating long-term archiving. As weve moved information onto digital formats, the limited longevity of those formatsnot to mention their decentralized nature, with no librarian to curate and preserve valueis a concern. Were already losing information, and this trend is sure to accelerate.

Work like Microsofts (and others) is crucial if were to avoid losing todays important cultural, legal, philosophical, and scientific contributions. And if some culture-starved pilgrim of the future were to stumble on a mysterious vault lost to time in the permafrosta cornucopia of seeds and some live Stevie Wonder tracks wouldnt be a bad find.

Image Credit: Global Music Vault

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Microsoft to Archive Music on Futuristic Slivers of Glass That Will Live 10,000 Years - Singularity Hub