My mother gave up smoking when she decided to have kids. Composing, too—she’d published a few contemporary pieces, which still sell modestly today. When I was in my early teens, my mother decided to have reel-to-reel recordings of the performances of her compositions transferred to standard cassettes, so they’d be durable for years to come. I remember the process costing hundreds of dollars. It was all in vain: a couple years later, we got our first CD player. At the time it didn’t see valuable to pay another fee to get the tapes transferred to the newer technology. Nowadays, though, it would take all of $6 to transfer the cassette to a CD-R and then an mp3.

And what next—would this then ensure that my grandkids could listen to those recordings? I fear I’ll be policing future audio technology until the day I die, and passing on to my offspring the guardianship of a sound.

It feels like digitization makes information last forever. Not everyone is so certain, especially those interested in preserving cultural history. Some have even posited the idea that the digital is nothing more than a passing moment in the broader technological process. Take, for instance, participants in the Rosetta Project: arguing that digitization grants little in the way of eternal life to language, music or other cultural signifiers, they have devoted the past eight years to finding a workable alternative. Ultimately the Rosetta project turned to a durable material—nickel—on which to begin preserving some of the world’s many minor—and quickly vanishing—languages.

On one side of the disk is a message written in eight major languages, hinting at the reverse side’s contents. The latter holds 13,000 pages of text in 1,500 languages, as well as original linguistic commentary, grammars and transcribed oral communication. “Since each page is a physical rather than digital image,” Rosetta Stone claims, “there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the disk requires only optical magnification.”

Implicit in this project is the idea that our current technological moment is the last in technological evolution. What could be more durable than something that is so tiny it’s invisible—data? We might go backwards to a time in which magnifying glasses are the only available tool; we’re not coming up with anything more accessible than data.

The Rosetta Project, while certainly noble, seems markedly limited in its effect. What the disk (obviously) does not preserve is the sound of each language, the subtle intonations and sounds specific to tongue placement that mark out any native speaker from a student learning it as a second language. “Music resembles language in the sense that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds” wrote Theodor Adorno, “which are more than just sounds. They say something, often something human.” Of course, the “stone” could have included, if the archivists so wished, or found the space, phonetic characters or symbols demarcating intonation. But phonetics and linguistic symbols are convoluted languages unto themselves, and nothing demonstrates the sound of a language quite like the voice of a native speaker. Unlike language, which depends on human voices—instruments we have so far failed, notwithstanding some effort, to artificially recreate—instrumental music relies upon what is undeniably inhuman, technological and replicable. Not all cellos are created equal, but one made in Amsterdam can be copied in Akron and still produce nearly the same sounds from the same sheet of music.

The language of music could, of course, be preserved textually just like the Eastern Kanjobal language. Yet the basic elements would remain incomplete. The notes of Beethoven’s 9th can be etched into nickel, but unless you have a cello, the actual sounds—the “something human” of music—is lost. Perhaps the notes alone might still be appreciated if played on the silicone kazoos of the future, but that seems to be against the spirit of the Rosetta project, which parallels how music archivists also feel about the importance of musical history.

Likewise, nano-text might preserve a language’s morphology and lexicon, but we have yet to see a way to preserve its sound—you might say, language’s music—independent of some sort of playback device. Similarly, all current methods of preserving music equally assume the playback function of the currently dominant technological meme. More or less, to record, store, or play music a special device (a computer) is required. In a sense that device determines the format of that data. It’s not difficult to imagine an apocalypse, a moment of cultural amnesia, or a history simply forgotten: the contents of the past could become unreadable or incomprehensible.

At the time my mother’s cassettes were made, she believed that she was granting an eternity to her work. That these recordings being read with the newest technology made her feel like her work lived very much in the present. While the actual recordings’ durability is contingent on the listening technology of a particular age, their underlying scores remain eternally playable on cello and flute. Cellists and flutists can read them and reproduce the sounds, more or less, they were intended to express. But cellos and flutes—these are technological matter. If, in a thousand years, they cease to exist, then so would Beethoven’s 9th, even if it was etched in nickel.

—Alexandra Heifetz