The music of data centres
True confession time: I had never been to a data centre before last week.
My knowledge of data centres up until that point was gleaned from references to them in conversations, press releases, articles and pictures of large, gleaming, sci-fi like rooms. I’d assumed that the futuristic look was accompanied by the silence you usually associate with it. Something reminiscent of the interiors of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Boy was I wrong.
Upon reflection, perhaps I should have expected some noise. These are, after all, factories in their own way. Data factories. And you usually associate factories with an ear-splitting din or cacophony of industrial sound.
But what a noise they produce. I joked to one of my fellow visitors that I could understand why the data centre game never really appealed to Apple given the company’s near obsession with making its computers as quiet as possible.
To my mind, there was something completely out of kilter between the perception from my visual experience of data centres and the actual reality. You could probably say that about a lot of IT to be honest.
While I was standing there listening to the company representative outline the features of the data centre, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the computer manufacturers had missed a trick in not trying to make the sound a little bit more harmonious.
Imagine if you could find a way to change the pitch of the noise generated by the banks of servers so that instead of emitting an ugly, harsh, metallic noise that literally scrapes at the air around you, they could make a chord sound. I’m not fussy which one. I mean, we probably all have our own favourite, even if we’re not sure which one. Some bands, for example, might start with an E, others with a G or an A or C or D.
Admittedly, just having the one chord might get boring after a while so maybe there could be a way of changing them over the course of the day. How great would that be.
Imagine if, for instance, there was some way of converting the sound coming from the servers into music. I’m not a scientist so that makes it easier for me to speculate on the possibility of a technology that would be able to manipulate the sound waves of the noise coming from all those servers and turn them into something more melodic.
You could end up creating music as a byproduct of running data centres. Computers being what they are, the music wouldn’t vary that much from day to day, week to week. At least, not as long as everything was going well. But if something did go awry, it would generate a dissonance in the overall ‘tune’. Wouldn’t that be a cool way of finding out something was wrong?
So last week I was in a data centre (three, actually) and this week I went to see The Black Crowes play at the 3 Arena. It was a fantastic experience to witness six musicians and two backing singers create such a wonderful noise and spark so much sheer enjoyment in so many people.
Walking back into town afterwards, it occurred to me that the studio versions of the music I had just witnessed were stored on a server in a data centre somewhere. That server in that data centre could send the music to anyone, anywhere but the only sound it could generate itself was a harsh, incessant, metallic whirr.
Meanwhile, the guys who had created the music sitting on that server had stood in front of however many thousand people that night and breathed new life and soul into it. And I was completely confident that they would go on to do it again the next night and the one after that.
No matter how much progress we make, that’s something all our servers and data centres will never be able to do. Not this week, next week or any other.
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