A Comparison of Methods for Visualizing Musical Genres

A well-designed visualization can make the exploration of music collections an intuitive and entertaining experience. In this paper, four different methods (colors, icons, fonts and avatars) for visualizing musical genres are presented and compared against each other. The performance of the different visualizations was studied in a series of online surveys with mostly Finnish participants, and the findings were then utilized in designing novel GUIs for an existing music recommendation system. Based on the results, the best performance can be achieved by combining different visualization methods together; while colors alone were not a good method for visualizing musical genres, the best performing method (avatars) was partially based on the findings of color and icon questionnaires. The easiest genre to visualize was metal; it performed best in both online questionnaires and practical prototype design.