Investigating How Music Affects Persuasion, Engagement, and Emotion in Data Videos

2026-01-25

AI Summary

The role of music in data visualization videos remains poorly understood. This study addresses this gap through a preregistered online controlled experiment comparing three conditions—no music, default background music, and custom-composed music by a professional composer—on viewers’ perceived persuasiveness, engagement, and emotional response. Results provide the first empirical evidence that default background music significantly enhances persuasiveness, whereas custom music yields inconsistent effects. Contrary to common assumptions, music did not significantly increase viewer engagement, and emotional responses were, in fact, stronger in the absence of music. These findings challenge the prevailing notion that music invariably amplifies emotional experience and offer both theoretical grounding and practical guidance for the strategic use of music in data-driven storytelling.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

Data videos have become a prominent vessel for communicating data to broad audiences, and a common object of study in information visualization. Many of these videos include music, yet the impact of music on how people experience data videos remains largely unexplored. We conducted a preregistered study into the effect of music across three dimensions: persuasion, engagement, and emotion. We showed online participants an existing data video (1) without any music, (2) with its generic default music, and (3) with custom music designed by a professional composer. We found that the default music helped make the data video more persuasive. However, the effects of custom music were more mixed, and we did not find that music increased engagement. In addition, and contrary to our expectations, our participants reported more intense emotions without music. Our study contributes new insights into the intersection of music and data visualization and is a first step toward guiding designers in creating impactful data-driven narratives.

Problem

• music
• data videos
• persuasion
• engagement
• emotion

Innovation

• data videos
• music
• persuasion
• engagement
• emotion