Both magnetic and optical storage formats-videotape, digital discs, and drives-decay much faster than commercial film stock. Despite living in the cloud, there is no heaven for digital data. And in fifty years, even if our CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and YouTube accounts retain their contents, which is unlikely, there will be no devices or software with which to read them. Skip even one generation of technological change and the precious photos, videos, or letters on the floppy disks in the closet become inaccessible or illegible.

Vibration is at the heart of nature. Music allows us to feel it.