MIDI Archive

MIDI Archive uses machine learning and archiving to give the visitor various entrypoints into the world of music on the early web.

Archives seem to have come into a kind of fashion as of late. In an age of planetary-scale existential precarity, they seem to offer solace in feeling knowable, certain, and grounding. The training procedures of AI foundation models like GPT have a close relationship with archives too, but instead rely on their accessibility, volume, and givenness, which allows archives to be composed and instrumentalized as training sets. I developed this project during my residency at Recurse Center in the fall of 2023 as an exploration of the opposing, and yet mutually reinforcing dynamics between building an archive and building a machine learning model.

See also