Ecologically Grounded Creative Practices in Ubiquitous Music

Instrumentally oriented and individualistic approaches dominate the current perspectives on musical interaction and technologically oriented composition. A view that focuses on the broad aspects of creativity support is proposed as a viable theoretical and methodological alternative: ubiquitous music practice. This article summarises several findings in ubiquitous music research, pointing to new theoretical frameworks that tackle the volatile and distributed creativity factors involved in musical activities that take place outside of traditional venues, involving the audience as an active creative partner. A new definition of ubiquitous music is proposed encompassing four components related to the human and the material resources, the emergent properties of musical activities and the design strategies involved in supporting distributed decision making. We highlight the application of embedded-embodied cognition in creative practice, arguing for the adoption of an ecologically grounded framework as an alternative to the mainstream anthropocentric and disembodied acoustic-instrumental paradigms. We discuss the relevance of the new materialist concepts of ecologies and meshworks within artistic creative practice, highlighting the implications of the emergent creativity support methods for context-based composition.