Global Music Vault
Spitsbergen, Svalbard archipelago, Norway
TOWERING over the frozen island of Spitsbergen, the largest in the archipelago of Svalbard, Norway, is a 鈥渄oomsday vault鈥�. Over 1 million seed varieties from around the world are being held in this mountainside facility, which is designed to preserve agricultural biodiversity and shield global food supplies from disaster. Now, a new kind of deposit is on its way to the mountain 鈥� the Global Music Vault (GMV), will store music from traditions across the planet.
鈥淲e see on a global scale that music is sometimes fragile, music gets lost,鈥� says Alfons Karabuda, president of UNESCO鈥檚 International Music Council and a board member for the GMV. A recent example he cites is Afghanistan鈥檚 musical culture, now under threat because and instruments are being smashed and burned across the country.
The first deposits to the GMV include: a number of contributions from the International Library of African Music in South Africa, which has one of the world鈥檚 biggest African music repositories; a selection of New Zealand music, provided by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington; material from the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies in Argentina, which uses Central and South American instruments; some a cappella music by the Fayha Choir in Lebanon; and pieces from Ketebul Music in Kenya, a non-profit arts organisation that preserves the musical traditions of East Africa.
Advertisement
鈥淲e could have gone for the Billboard Hot 100 or the most popular playlists on streaming services,鈥� says Karabuda. 鈥淚nstead, we have people representing music [from] all over the world helping us. And we are also looking at indie musicians, like Beatie Wolfe.鈥�
Wolfe says that the project fits with her desire to push boundaries, which she does by creating new formats for her music and making science accessible through her art. In 2017, she debuted her album Raw Space in an augmented reality livestream from what was then the quietest room on Earth, Nokia Bell Labs鈥檚 anechoic chamber in Murray Hill, New Jersey. A recording of this stream was beamed to the stars via the Holmdel Horn Antenna, which once detected the cosmic microwave background and provided evidence in support of the big bang theory.
In 2020, Wolfe built a digital installation, featuring her song From Green to Red, which uses NASA data to illustrate changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 800,000 years. 鈥淚t is an environmental protest piece,鈥� she says, explaining that humans have damaged the planet more in the past 25 years than in all our prior history. 鈥淓ven in our knowing [about climate change], we have increased emissions so significantly,鈥� she says.
Wolfe has chosen this song to go in the vault, along with Oh My Heart, which debuted at the 2021 Nobel Prize Summit. To protect them, the GMV has teamed up with a Microsoft research group working to develop sustainable, long-term data storage. Lasers will etch the song data onto silica glass plates around the size of drinks coasters. This inert material can withstand harsh environments, resist electromagnetic pulses and could last at least 1000 years.
鈥淭he idea of unearthing it in thousands of years is almost too exciting a prospect, just because I feel we may be short-lived as a species,鈥� says Wolfe. But she isn鈥檛 a total pessimist: depositing music in the vault suggests at least some hope for a future audience. As she says, nature and art aren鈥檛 just for surviving, but for thriving: 鈥淚 feel like music has to be included in this vault because it is one of the things that keeps us all alive inside.鈥�
