Research
My research interests are music cognition, memory, and how music interacts with other art forms.
How listeners decide what matters within dense or ambiguous sound.
How repetition, tension, and return affect emotional interpretation and expectation.
How music can contribute to a narrative, flesh out its world, and ruin the audience's emotional state.
Featured Project
ORFEO is an independent research project asking how musical fragments become emotionally meaningful before listeners can describe them analytically.
Question: When does a person's perception stop being accepted as part of a shared reality?
Argument: Using Cervantes and Foucault, I examine madness not as a simple break from reality, but as a social label applied when an individual's perception falls outside the negotiated world around them.
Conclusion: The danger is not madness itself, but preventing some people from taking part in the common reality a community is constantly constructing.
Question: How does Loreena McKennitt use the recurring images of the mask and the mirror to connect identity, spirituality, and cultural encounter?
Approach: I analyse the album stanza by stanza, tracing its literary, religious, and symbolic references across Celtic, Mediterranean, and North African traditions.
Conclusion: I read the album not as a geographical journey, but as a symbolic movement through human experience: the mask as the identity we present outwardly, and the mirror as the introspection through which we search for meaning.
Context: co-developed with Sigrid Lapuente Köster using data from Laura Fuerte Monge's master's thesis.
Question: Can test design amplify gendered differences in confidence and performance in science?
Finding: The analysed results suggest that penalties for incorrect answers may magnify confidence gaps, particularly when students already associate STEM performance with gendered expectations.
