The British band Massive Attack are considered pioneers of trip hop, an atmospheric style of electronic music featuring laid-back beats. It’s now been 20 years since the release of Mezzanine, the album which marked their international breakthrough and remains their most successful project to date. To mark the album’s 20th anniversary, the band are having it stored in DNA molecules – using technology developed at ETH Zurich. “This method allows us to archive the music for hundreds to thousands of years,” says Robert Grass, professor at ETH Zurich’s Functional Materials Laboratory. By way of comparison: CDs are said to last around 30 years.

Translating from digital to DNA

Grass and his colleague Reinhard Heckel, a former ETH scientist now at Rice University, translated the album’s digital audio into genetic code. “While the information stored on a CD or hard disk is a sequence of zeros and ones, biology stores genetic information in a sequence of the four building blocks of DNA: A, C, G and T,” explains Grass.

In order to keep data volumes manageable, Grass and his colleagues worked on the project using a music file which he had compressed to 15 megabytes using the Opus coding format. Opus is a compression software for audio data that is qualitatively superior to the well-known MP3. A US company is now in the process of producing 920,000 short DNA strands, which taken together contain all of Mezzanine’s information. TurboBeads, a Zurich-based ETH spin-off, will then pour these molecules into 5,000 tiny (nanometre-sized) glass spheres, each of which contains part of the information. Grass expects the project to be complete in a month or two.