Microsoft is working to build a Global Music Vault to preserve music for over 10,000 years. The vault is located within the same cold-storage facility that houses the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which stores duplicates of 1,145,693 seed varieties from nearly every country in the world.
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Called Project Silica, the music storage unit involves a glass hard drive that operates like a CD and can hold up to 100GB of digital data, or roughly 20,000 songs. The quartz glass features a symmetrical molecular structure, which makes it more resilient to high temperatures and pressure.
“Here, master music files and irreplaceable music data are to be preserved in music capsules, protected in the vault, and remembered for eternity,” says the Elire Group, who is overseeing the vault, which is working with Microsoft to testing the new, glass-based storage system to store the music for thousands of years.
The company is testing a glass-based storage system, which can preserve music beyond the life of vinyl—that can last up to 100 years in good condition—cassette tapes, which can last for 10 years, CDs, which last for 15, and computer hard drives, which have a shorter life span of five years.
Using a femtosecond laser—which can fire for one quadrillionth of a second—Microsoft etches information as 3D patterns into the glass. Once the data is stored, another laser reads the quartz as machine learning algorithms translate the pattern back into music, movies, or any other digital information.
“The goal is to be able to store archival and preservation data at cloud scale in glass,” said Ant Rowstrong, engineer and deputy lab director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
The fragility of some of the more archaic mediums of music was evident in 2008 when a fire at Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed nearly 175,000 master recordings for UMG artists.
Photos: Luca Bracali / Visit Norway
