Silvia Mantilla-Wright

Thesis

Thesis

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

• Supervisor: Anna Bramwell-Dicks

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 clarinetist, 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 at the University of Leeds to understand further the theories on feeling and perceiving music and completed my dissertation on immersion experienced by players in response to video game music while playing Undertale.

In my current PhD journey, I sing, play bass clarinet, and love doing arts & crafts in my free time.

Research

Research

Musical empathy, musical cohesion in video games, equality diversity & inclusion, ludology and narratology, ethics, music storytelling in interactive media, queer methodology, 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

Publications

Publications

• 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.
• 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.
• Joint Programme Chair for the Sound and Music for Immersive Storytelling conference 2022
• Co-Editor for Journal of Sound and Music in Games special issue publication for “Hades”, 2022-2024.
• Mantilla-Wright, S. (2024). “There Is No Escape”: Hades and the Apotheosis of Death. Journal of Sound and Music in Games, (Issue Pending).