For this project, I conducted quantitative and experimental design to investigate the effect of music tempo and its significance on human decision-making skills when choosing between typographic designs within the parameters of roleplaying. Because this was during the peak of COVID-19 restrictions, I used Qualtrics surveys and audio integrations to conduct an unmoderated study since in-person meetings were not viable at this time.
 

To explore this effect, I had 40 total participants undergo 2 rounds of 15 roleplay trials each, wherein each trial they viewed images of identical phrases of text but written in different fonts. They were instructed to choose which style they thought best suited the roleplay parameters all while either high tempo music, low tempo music, or no music played throughout the round. I distributed 4 separate surveys that varied in high or low tempo as well as the presented order of music and no-music rounds, and 10 users were randomly assigned to each survey.
 

I found no statistical significance suggesting that either slow or fast tempo had direct influence in their decision making process; however, my experiment suffered from low statistical power due to the small sample size per survey. My study encourages further exploration into the relationship between different elements of music and typographic design, which may be relevant to consumer marketing.