Songwriting as translation: A Practice-as-Research approach

Abstract

This article positions songwriting as an intrinsically translational practice and advances a Practice-as-Research (PaR) methodology to demonstrate how the experience of a place’s atmosphere can be translated into a musicopoetic artefact. Grounded in Böhme’s phenomenology of ‘atmosphere’ (2017), Vidal and Campbell’s framework of ‘experiential translation’ (2024, 2025), and Smith’s theorisation of the ‘artefact’ (2007), the study centres on the song búzios. (Galvão, 2024), which renders the atmosphere of the Brazilian peninsula of Búzios as experienced in 2018–2019. Drawing on Barrett and Bolt’s PaR model (2007) and Haseman’s ‘performative paradigm’ (2006, 2007), it details a songwriting-as-translation process that is analysed using Bennett’s ‘musical building blocks’ (2002) and an intermusicality lens informed by Desblache (2019). The study thus establishes songwriting as an embodied creative practice through which the resulting artefact emerges as the subject, method, and evidence of research, enriching Translation Studies’ engagement with the creative arts.