Silvia Mantilla Wright

Thesis

Thesis

Music as an agent: Video game narrative, musical empathy, and the music that flows between

My PhD research investigates how a player’s perception of the video game soundtrack and narrative can influence ludic interpretation and experience based on their ability to empathise with the music.

Biography

Biography

• Master of Arts in Applied Psychology of Music – University of Leeds
• Bachelor of Arts in Music, Minor in Psychology – Florida Atlantic University

I’m a Peruvian scholar, musician, and gamer. I have been a musician and a video game player for as long as I can remember and naturally my interests in both led me to pursue music at an academic level. While I am a classically trained clarinettist, my research interests were with audio-visual pairings and so, my undergraduate dissertation was on audience emotional perceptions of audio-visual pairings using film soundtracks.

Following this, I pursued the MA in Applied Psychology of Music to understand further the theories on feeling and perceiving music and completed my dissertation on the immersion experienced in response to video game music while playing Undertale.

Research

Research interests

Musical empathy, musical cohesion in video games, ludology and narratology, empathy, music storytelling in interactive media, authentic representations of cultural music in media, audio-visual pairings and musical incongruency, embodied affective response to music, music cognition, music psychology, Latin American ethnomusicology (particularly Peruvian music studies), video game immersion.

External Activity

External Activity

• Joint Programme Chair for the Sound and Music for Immersive Storytelling conference 2022
• ThinkTank presentation: Mantilla-Wright, S. (2021, June 25). Music as an agent: Video game narrative, musical empathy, and the music that flows between [Student ThinkTank presentation]. International Community for Auditory Display 2021 - Doctoral Student ThinkTank, Virtual.

Publications

Publications

Upcoming conference paper

• Mantilla-Wright, S. (2022, April 21-23). ‘It’s in the blood’: The dichotomous nature of Hades’s soundtrack and the modern mythological mending of family ties [Conference presentation]. Ludomusicology 2022, London, United Kingdom.