Carnegie Hall’s AI Voicebox Makes 130 Years of History Conversational

NEW YORK, NY – December 17, 2025 – Carnegie Hall, the international standard for musical excellence for over a century, has launched a groundbreaking AI-powered tool that allows the public to conversationally explore its entire 130-plus-year performance history. The new digital resource, named Voicebox, was developed in partnership with the leading AI and knowledge graph company Stardog and represents a significant leap forward in making cultural heritage accessible to everyone.

Online visitors can now visit carnegiehall.org/voicebox and interact with a conversational chat interface to ask complex questions about the more than 62,000 events that have graced the venue’s iconic stages. This innovation transforms a vast historical database into an engaging, interactive experience, inviting music lovers, students, historians, and artists to discover the connections between legendary performers, renowned compositions, and pivotal moments in music history.

A New Window into a Storied Past

For nearly four decades, Carnegie Hall’s Susan W. Rose Archives team has meticulously reconstructed the Hall's history, piece by piece. Prior to the archives' establishment in 1986, no central repository existed, and much of the institution's legacy was scattered or lost. Today, the archive holds over 400,000 items, from programs and posters to photographs and architectural drawings.

Voicebox provides an intuitive new portal into this immense collection. Users can now ask questions in plain English, such as “Who was the first jazz artist to perform at Carnegie Hall?” or “How many times was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony performed in the 1950s, and by which orchestras?” The AI is designed to understand the query and retrieve precise, context-rich answers, moving far beyond the limitations of traditional keyword searches.

“As an organization, we're always looking at how technology can improve the experience of those we serve at Carnegie Hall,” said Ezra Wiesner, Chief Information Officer at Carnegie Hall. “We're excited to work with Stardog and use their cutting-edge technology to experiment with a new window into the world of Carnegie Hall in a way that honors its history and inspires new generations of music lovers to explore.”

The Technology Behind the Curtain

What distinguishes Voicebox from many contemporary AI chatbots is the sophisticated technology platform it is built upon. Stardog’s solution employs a hybrid AI approach that combines the generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the structured, verifiable foundation of a knowledge graph.

This knowledge graph serves as a meticulously organized digital brain, mapping the complex relationships between artists, composers, dates, venues, and musical works within Carnegie Hall’s history. When a user asks a question, Voicebox translates the natural language into a precise query that runs against this graph. This method grounds the AI’s responses in a single, authoritative source of truth, effectively preventing the “hallucinations” or factual inaccuracies that can plague purely LLM-based systems. Every answer can be traced back to its source data within the archive, ensuring reliability and trust.

“At Stardog, we help organizations uncover trusted and often hidden insights from their data,” said CEO Craig Harper. “AI can be a very abstract concept for the general public and partnering with Carnegie Hall is a unique opportunity to bring our technology to the public in a way that is meaningful, educational, and enduring.”

From NASA to the Concert Hall

Stardog has built its reputation by developing advanced AI systems for some of the world’s most data-intensive organizations, including NASA, Morgan Stanley, Raytheon, and Bosch. Its platform is trusted in critical environments where data accuracy is non-negotiable, from financial services to national defense. The collaboration with Carnegie Hall marks a significant and strategic expansion for the company into the cultural heritage sector.

This move highlights the growing recognition of AI’s potential within Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM). The global digital humanities market is expanding rapidly as institutions seek new ways to manage, preserve, and increase engagement with their collections. By successfully applying its enterprise-grade technology to a public-facing cultural project, Stardog is demonstrating the versatility of its platform and positioning itself as a key player in this emerging market. The Carnegie Hall partnership serves as a powerful case study for how sophisticated AI can democratize access to specialized knowledge, breaking down data silos that have long existed within cultural institutions.

A Legacy Reimagined in the Digital Age

The launch of Voicebox is not an isolated event but the latest milestone in Carnegie Hall’s long-term digital strategy. The institution has been progressively embracing technology to preserve its legacy and share it with a global audience. This journey began in earnest with a major digitization initiative in 2012, followed by the 2013 launch of its online Performance History Search, which first made program information from 1891 to the present publicly available.

In 2019, the Hall’s Digital Collections invited the public to explore and download tens of thousands of digitized archival items for the first time. A crucial, though less visible, step came in 2017 when the archives began making its data available as semantic linked open data, creating a structured foundation for connecting its information across the web.

“In 2017, we decided to make our semantic linked open data available on the web, enabling us to connect our information to other data found online,” said Rob Hudson, Assistant Director of Carnegie Hall’s Rose Museum and Archives. “The introduction of Voicebox builds on that foundation, encouraging online visitors to interact with our history in a fun, easy way.”

This deliberate, multi-year effort underscores a deep commitment to not only preserving history but also making it dynamic and relevant for the 21st century. The Voicebox project is a testament to this vision, leveraging the most advanced tools available to fulfill the institution's core mission of education and accessibility in an increasingly digital world. As other cultural institutions grapple with how to manage and present their own vast histories, Carnegie Hall's thoughtful integration of AI provides a compelling model for the future.