Music and Motion in First-Person Virtual Reality Games

Kate Mancey uses the concepts of place illusion and plausibility illusion from the field of Psychology to highlight the role of music in virtual reality games. In particular, she is concerned with the perception of motion in music, a motion that, in the game’s world, is independent of any changes in the player’s head position. Using Half-Life: Alyx as an example, Mancey offers a methodology for analyzing motion in recorded sound and shows how music’s independence of motion allows the player to imagine the presence of other entities beyond what can be seen. Through this, she argues that music offers a life force for virtual worlds.