The goal of the Universal Hip Hop Museum is to honor and explore hip hop as a true artform, tracing its legacy and influence from the South Bronx across music, fashion, film, and more — globally. Currently, there exists no American institution dedicated to this pursuit. UHHM broke ground in 2019, and as construction continues, a pop-up exhibition space across the street is hosting a series of installations and artifacts from the birthplace of hip hop, the Boogie Down Bronx. We collaborated with UHHM and MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality to create an interactive, personalized exploration of hip hop, using Microsoft’s Conversational AI chatbot. Our installation, the Breakbeat Narratives, uses technology and an interface that younger patrons are more comfortable with (the online chat), making the past of this artform more accessible.

“It’s more than just music now. It’s everything.” So says Universal Hip Hop Museum Executive Director Rocky Bucano. And he’s right. So in order to trace the evolution of hip hop in a way that resonated with guests no matter their hip hop knowledge or background, we tapped MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality and Microsoft’s Conversational AI to create the Breakbeat Narratives, a guided exploration of the depth and breadth of hip hop as an art form. Guests answer simple questions about their music taste to get a personalized look at some of the founders of the movement, the musical and cultural building blocks of hip hop, and the standard-bearers of the artform today — resulting in a customized Spotify playlist for them to explore further.

The strategy was simple: Allow guests at the museum to get a tailored experience that exposes them to the breadth and depth of hip hop’s cultural impact by basing that experience on data that they provide. Whether that visitor is a huge hip hop head or more of a country music fan, by learning their own music preferences, we could tailor The Breakbeat Narratives to be an impactful and engaging look at the relevance of hip hop as an art form. By turning Microsoft’s Conversational AI into a series of colorful Afrofuturist characters, we could engage with guests in a more inspiring and authentic way, while also imparting knowledge about the 5 core elements of hip hop: MCing, turntablism, breakdancing, graffiti art, and knowledge.

On a compressed timeline of less than 5 months leading up to the Universal Hip Hop Museum’s pop-up opening in the Bronx, we worked closely with MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, led by Dr. D. Fox Harrell, as well as the Board of UHHM and Microsoft technologists, to develop a new discovery engine for the history and legacy of hip hop as an art form. This resulted in a digital installation at the museum on a large touchscreen Surface computer, called The Breakbeat Narratives. “Because there’s not one singular story of the evolution and the revolution that led to hip hop culture now, we wanted every single story to reveal nuance,” says Dr. Harrell. We worked with his team to create Afrofuturist characters based on the 5 core elements of hip hop (MCing, turntablism, breakdancing, graffiti art, and knowledge), which guide visitors through the history of hip hop using Microsoft Conversational AI, personalizing the experience to each guest based on music preferences, and other queries posed by the AI in the form of these characters. After this guided trip through hip hop, visitors receive a personalized Spotify playlist, tailored to their preferences and emphasizing education on the style and substance of hip hop as an art form and cultural force. Microsoft technology in the form of AI literally powers the entire experience, exemplifying Microsoft’s brand mission of “empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Thanks to the user data we were able to collect via the Microsoft Conversational AI chatbots, we could tailor every experience to the guest. Simply stated, the Breakbeat Narratives would not exist without that data. It would just be another digital timeline (albeit with a killer soundtrack). By asking for interaction and data from each guest, we prolonged visitor engagement with the Breakbeat Narratives, and hence the Microsoft product.