CD and digital album covers are part of the music purchase/consumption experience, yet very little is known about how album cover design influences people's expectations concerning, and their perception of, music. This paper explores the effect of the typeface curvilinearity of album cover design on people's expectations and perception of music. Typeface curvilinearity has been shown to influence expectations across other sensory modalities, such as taste (gustation). Across three studies, we demonstrate how angular versus rounded typeface can impact expectations concerning how the music will sound. We also demonstrate how angular and rounded typefaces influence emotion ratings of actual music samples. In Experiment 1, typeface curvilinearity influenced people's expectations of music, with participants expecting the music to sound more angular, masculine, fast, rough, happy, evil, violent, exciting, and active when the typeface on the faux CD album cover was angular compared to when it was round. Conversely, participants expected the music to sound more round, feminine, slow, smooth, sad, good, gentle, calm, and passive when the typeface was round than when it was angular. Experiment 2 demonstrated that typeface curvilinearity influenced people's ratings of emotional valence but not arousal in neutral music (i.e., music that is considered neither round nor angular). Specifically, participants evaluated the music as sounding more pleasant when the CD cover featured round typeface. Finally, in Experiment 3, we did not find evidence that CD album cover typeface influences people's perception of arousal or valance of music when the music itself is rated as sounding highly round or angular. These results will be of interest to designers and marketing experts when creating CD covers, logos, posters, and lyric videos.

Today, some of the most widely attended concerts are in virtual reality (VR). For example, the videogame Fortnite recently attracted 12.3 million viewers sitting in homes all over the world to a VR Travis Scott rap concert. As such VR concerts become increasingly ubiquitous, we are presented with an opportunity to design more immersive virtual experiences by augmenting VR with other multisensory technologies. Given that sound is a multi-modal phenomenon that can be experienced sonically and vibrationally, we investigated the importance of haptic feedback to musical experiences using a combination of qualitative and empirical methodologies. Study 1 was a qualitative study demonstrating that, unlike their live counterparts, current VR concerts make it harder for audiences to form a connection with artists and their music. Furthermore, VR concerts lack multisensory feedback and are perceived as less authentic than live concert experiences. Participants also identified a variety of different kinds of touch that they receive at live concerts and suggested that ideal VR concerts would replicate physical touch and thermal feedback from the audience, emotional touch, and vibrations from the music. Specifically, users advocated for the use of haptic devices to increase the immersiveness of VR concert experiences. Study 2 isolated the role of touch in the music listening experience and empirically investigated the impact of haptic music players (HMPs) on the audio-only listening experience. An empirical, between-subjects study was run with participants either receiving vibrotactile feedback via an HMP (haptics condition) or no vibrotactile feedback (control) while listening to music. Results indicated that listening to music while receiving vibrotactile feedback increased participants’ sense of empathy, parasocial bond, and loyalty towards the artist, while also decreasing participants’ feelings of loneliness. The connection between haptics condition and these dependent variables was mediated by the feeling of social presence. Study 2 thus provides initial evidence that HMPs may be used to meet people’s need for connection, multisensory immersion, and complex forms of touch in VR concerts as identified in Study 1.