Associating fonts with musical genres

Abstract

We arranged an online questionnaire to study the feasibility of representing musical genres with fonts. The questionnaire consisted of 17 figures and each of them contained three text strings with different fonts. In each figure, the participants were asked which musical genre comes to their mind when looking at the text strings. The results suggest that the musical genre may be presented by a font and it can be recognized quite accurately. The most successful font collections were: classical (90.9% of participants made the same association between font and genre), metal (87.3%), country (85.5%), electronica amp; dance (83.6%), and world music (58.2%). On the average, the participants made the correct association in nearly seven cases out of 17.