An album by trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack is headed for near-eternal storage in DNA molecules within tiny glass beads.

It’s been 20 years since the release of Mezzanine, the British band’s most successful project to date. To mark the album’s 20th anniversary, the band is having it stored in DNA molecules.

“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.

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 that 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, an ETH spin-off, will then pour these molecules into 5,000 tiny (nanometer-sized) glass spheres, each of which contains part of the information. Grass expects the project to be complete in a month or two.

1/27,000 of the entire album as a genetic code. Image: Robert Grass/ETH Zurich

Grass and Heckel developed this technology at ETH Zurich three years ago, and stored the text of the Swiss Federal Charter of 1291 in one of these small glass spheres for a technical feasibility study.

“What is new about the project with Massive Attack is that this technology is now also being used commercially,” says Grass. The 15-megabyte music album is the second-largest file ever stored in DNA. Microsoft reported a few months ago that it had stored a collection of files totaling more than 200 megabytes, the only known DNA storage project that is bigger.

The 5,000 glass beads of the Massive Attack album are invisible to the naked eye. They will sit in a tiny bottle of water, with a practically eternal shelf life. The DNA can be removed from the glass beads at any time, allowing the use of DNA sequencing to read the stored music file and play it back on a computer.