Samantha Jingyi Du is a Pamela Jackson Scholar and MSc by Research candidate in Musicology at the University of Edinburgh, working closely with St Cecilia’s Hall: Concert Room & Music Museum. Her current project, provisionally titled Silent Organology and Mediated Audition, develops a proxy-chain model to explain how museums produce “audible knowledge” for historical instruments that are not sounded in situ—across label texts, online records, approved audio, and gallery acoustics.

Samantha’s academic formation spans languages, literature, and music. She earned a BA in Chinese Linguistics and Literature and an MPhil in Comparative and World Literature at Renmin University of China, where she began researching Chinese–Western musical modernity and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. She later pursued as a research member of the China-Greek Civilisation Research Program, conducted independent research on the topic of Musical Iconology of Ancient Greece and China, exploring the intersection of music, art, and philosophy in both cultures studies. She studied as visiting student at the University of Edinburgh (2023), department of Humanities and Arts.

Samantha’s academic trajectory combines Chinese–Western musical modernity with museum-based inquiry. She has presented at the 24th International Conference on Chinese Philosophy (Ljubljana, 2025), examining “The Five Tones Heal Diseases” and “Great Sound is Silent” as frameworks for musical perception and order; she has presented on Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde at the “Sounding China in Western Music” forum (Shanghai Conservatory, 2024); on Renaissance organ iconology (China Academy of Art, 2024). Besides, she has also developed great interest on post-humanity and game study. She has presented at the First National Graduate Game Forum and Academic Conference on The Reality and Potential of Video Games. (East China Normal University, 2024)  and at the Young Scholar Game Studies Conferences (Poland, 2025).

At St Cecilia’s Hall, she examines Scottish instruments alongside East Asian instruments to address endonyms/exonyms, timbral metaphors, and decolonising interpretation. Her broader aim is to articulate the instrument as both a material object and a musical-philosophical problem, linking museum ethics to modes of listening and knowledge-making across traditions.