With traditional independent record stores now closing and malls
no longer selling Red Book Compact Discs, will DNA prove to be the “future-proof”
music format of the future?
By: Ringo Bones
With traditional independent music stores – ones that sell vinyl
LPs and Redbook 16-bit 44.1 KHz sampled compact discs closing and big malls no
longer selling Redbook CDs, it seems that it would only be a matter of time
that every Generation-Xers music collection could be consigned to the dustbin
of history much sooner than expected. Thankfully, to celebrate the 20th
anniversary of the release of their most successful album, UK based electronic
music group Massive Attack released their Mezzanine album on DNA back in
October 2018.
Massive Attack worked with Andrew Melchior at the technology consultancy
3rd Space Agency – the man who helped BjÓ§rk convert her performance
of “Stonemilker” into virtual reality for her 2015 MOMA show. According to
Melchior: “The advantage with DNA is that our civilization could crash into
dust and rebuild itself using entirely different technology, meaning they
couldn’t access our computers or disks, since every human carries DNA, we can
expect any future civilization to work out how to play back DNA-stored information.
Which means the first thing a future civilization would learn about us might be
Mezzanine.”
Using the DNA molecule to store vast amounts of digitally encoded
information is more than just a science fiction pipe dream that was first
popularly presented in the Superman movie franchise Man of Steel. The idea has
first been published back in 1964 to 1965 when a Soviet era physicist named
Mikhail Neiman published his work on the subject in the journal Radiotekhnika.
But the first successful execution of encoding digital data onto a DNA molecule
was back in 2012 when Harvard biologist George Church encoded one of his books
onto a DNA molecule.
The electronic musicians Massive Attack worked with scientists at
TurboBeads, a commercial spin-off from the Swiss science, engineering and
mathematics university ETH Zurich, to adopt a technology pioneered by maverick US
biotechnologists Craig Venter when he created a synthetic chromosome of a
bacteria species in the laboratory with four “watermarks” written in the DNA.
Robert Grass, professor at ETH Zurich’s Functional Materials Laboratory and his
colleague Reinhard Heckel used similar chemical techniques to translate
Mezzanine’s digital audio stream into genetic code. “We store digital
information in a sequence of zeroes and ones, but biology stores genetic
information using the four building blocks of DNA,” Grass explains. “We
compressed Mezzanine’s digital audio then coded it as DNA molecules by
converting the binary 0s and 1s into a quaternary code – with adenine
representing 00, cytosine representing 01, guanine representing 10 and thymine
representing 11. The resulting DNA resembles natural DNA in every way, although
it contains no useful genetic information.”
According to Massive Attack band member Robert del Naja: “The
storage potential of DNA is huge.” Indeed, one milligram of the DNA molecule
could store the complete text of every book in the US Library of Congress and
have room to spare. Del Naja also states: “If you think about DNA versus the
ridiculous amounts of server farms that have got to be cooled 24/7 all around
the world, this looks like a much better solution going forward. It allows us
to archive music for hundreds of thousands of years.” Unfortunately as of late
no word yet on the newfangled format’s sound quality.
