The project emerges from a larger qualitative study and addresses the research question ‘How does the creation of a song based on one participant’s narrative and playlist help us understand academics’ lived experience of fibromyalgia?’. This practice-research responds to the limitations of conventional qualitative methods in capturing the affective, embodied, and variable dimensions of fibromyalgia.

The project involved a collaboration between the researcher (Nicole), who has both academic and lived experience of fibromyalgia, and an electronic musician (Stephen), whose understanding of the condition was through indirect lived experience. Drawing on reflexive thematic analysis, Stephen analysed one participant’s interview narrative and playlist before composing the original song ‘burn me down’.
Songwriting functioned not as illustration, but as a mode of embodied enquiry that ‘thinks with sound’, enabling tacit and affective dimensions of experience to emerge through creative practice. The resulting composition conveys tensions between fragility and stoicism, cyclical pain and fluctuating energy, and the emotional labour of sustaining an academic identity while living with chronic illness.

The article argues that songwriting as method can operate simultaneously as analysis and representation within arts-based research, expanding possibilities for practice-research into lived experience. It also reflects on issues of authorship, collaboration, and embodied knowledge within practiceresearch. Overall, this project demonstrates how creative-analytical processes can generate insights inaccessible through text alone, offering a compelling model for integrating music into qualitative research.

2026 – NBrown & SJBrown – burn me down – songwriting