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Top1. Introduction
The usage of the internet as a musical resource is not new. Pre-internet activities can be traced back to the late 1970s, with various artists located in the US proposing musical activities supported by ad hoc networks (Bischoff et al. 1978). During the 1990s, Rich Gold used early versions of the internet within the context of his work in ubiquitous computing at Xerox Parc. Some years later, Chris Chafe and a team of researchers at Stanford University deployed fully blown synchronous eight-channel sound between two halls located on campus. These early experiences were all characterised by custom software and hardware tailored to handle the limitations of the extant know-how and equipment, bypassing the lack of standard protocols. Despite the technical advances of the following two decades, the usage of the internet as a platform for music-making remained a fairly restricted phenomenon mostly adopted by the artistic and research institutions that had sufficient funding and access to dedicated infrastructure such as, for instance, the Internet 2.0. This situation changed in 2020.
Keller, Costalonga and Messina (2020: 11) describe a change of mindset regarding the use of technological support for artistic practice, listing physical isolation and reduced mobility as propaedeutic for an overcoming of acoustic-instrumental practices in favour of domestic, asynchronous and multimodal musical exchanges. Thus, the pandemic context set the stage for the expansive exploration of internet platforms for artistic goals. Obviously, this presented both challenges and opportunities regarding the profile of the musical stakeholders.1 Places that were previously deemed unworthy of artistic exploration suddenly became valid settings for musical endeavours. A panoply of practices based on networked platforms mushroomed, highlighting the need for practice-oriented research not only targeting the available commercial tools but also considering the specific needs of participants previously excluded as doers. Ubiquitous music (ubimus) comprises a body of knowledge that contributes toward these goals.
A first wave of ubimus proposals (2007-2014) featured multiple threads characterised by an exploratory and diverse set of experiences that yielded useful hints and unveiled promising areas of investigation (Keller et al. 2010; Miletto et al. 2011). Some proposals were oriented toward the development of infrastructure. Others tended to gather empirical evidence by deploying prototypes and assessing their impact on the creative processes. By targeting distributed resources, these experiences underline the limitations of a one-size-fits-all perspective on musical interaction. In fact, a strong corollary of these initiatives is that imposing a pre-established genre – such as chamber instrumental music – to all internet-based musical practices is prone to exclude ways of doing music that do not fit within the 19th-century European instrumental moulds.2
Avoiding the acoustic-instrumental ways of handling musical experiences is among the most difficult targets set by the first-wave ubimus agenda. Acoustic-instrumental concepts are not only central components of the mainstream trends in musical interaction – including “virtuosic performance” and “self-expression” (Wessel and Wright 2002) – they are also core elements of widely adopted working methods, e.g. orchestras, the concert hall and similar hierarchical forms of social organisation for digital music-making. Complementing the critical analysis of hegemonic musical-interaction methods, second-wave ubimus frameworks give salience to a characteristic of interaction design which may eventually become a guiding principle for infrastructure developments: aesthetic pliability. Aesthetic pliability comprises emerging approaches to interaction and artistic practice. One trend is represented by the expansion of creative practices enabled not only by the convergence of technological platforms (see Pimenta et al. 2014 for a ubimus perspective on this issue), but also as an answer to the passive role of the audience enforced by the acoustic-instrumental mindset.