Issue thematic title: Ecologically Grounded Creative Practices and Ubiquitous Music, Interaction and Environment
Publishers: Cambridge University Press
Event: UbiMus Symposium, Derry, Northern Ireland

Issue Editors:
Damián Keller, NAP, Federal University of Acre
Victor Lazzarini, Maynooth University
Brian Bridges, Ulster University, bd.bridges@ulster.ac.uk (contact address)

Ubiquitous music (ubimus) seeks to address the intersection between current mobile, networked technologies, including embedded systems, vintage, modular and analogue hardware, internet of things (IoT) and emerging social, interactive and enactive perspectives on music making. Thus, ubimus research has applied a variety of theories and methods, including ecological, embodied, embedded and distributed models of cognition and creativity. In addition, ubimus practices involve participatory, accessible, inclusive and community-oriented approaches to design.

The diverse platforms, methods and theoretical perspectives of ubimus are unified by an agenda which seeks the integration of musical creativity with expanded and pliable conceptions of sonic activity, listening, embedded-embodied interaction and multimodality. Indeed, such ‘sensory turns’ find parallels in the recent sonic turn in the arts and humanities (Cobussen, Meelberg and Truax 2017), making ubimus and related research suited to diverse discourses and constituents at various interfaces between the arts and technology. Through a broad dissemination of techniques and tools, and through a variety of fora, previously excluded groups are now actively participating in music creation. How is this affecting the scope and content of the new sonic practices which have emerged from this wider distribution of skills and technologies? Do we need new models to discuss the relationships between tools, creators and musics in the context of such distributed practices, away from the discourses of virtuosity and specialism, and legacy acoustic-instrumental models, which may persist within musicology?

The ubimus imperative towards a holistic view of musical experience and technological design finds roots in concepts such as Varèse’s organised sound, Schafer’s soundscape, Feld’s acoustemology, Small’s musicking and Landy’s sound-based music, all of which provide framing whereby a variety of sonic-oriented practices are seen to converge. Ubimus also finds common ground with emerging currents in human-computer interaction, including the embodied turn, third-wave approaches, multimodal and sonic interaction, immersive, augmented and locative media, and the emerging aesthetic and creativity-oriented perspectives on interaction design. The connections between ubimus and the current conceptions of socially motivated and materially grounded interaction further points to the consideration of music as an ecosystem; a site for the meeting of people, technologies and situated resources for creative activities and experiences. The modularity of such approaches also references another aspect of music’s materiality and associated questions of environmental sustainability: that of the challenge of reusing and reconfiguring older hardware to support new practices.

This edited volume of Organised Sound will include expanded materials from the Eleventh and Twelfth Workshops on Ubiquitous Music (UbiMus 2021, to be held in Porto, and UbiMus 2022, to be held in Curitiba). We equally invite independent submissions which approach the intersection between ecologically grounded creativity and ubimus as an interface or ecosystem: a site for creative technologies, methodologies and frameworks that fosters the emergence of new musical practices.

Suggested themes include, but are not restricted to:
· Ubimus and sound-based music: theories compared
· Ubimus and ecological perspectives on timbre, sound processing and/or meaning
· Ubimus, performance systems and improvisatory or comprovisatory practices
· Ubimus performance systems as sonic and creative ecologies
· Ubimus, sonification and musification
· Ubimus and multimodal and sonic interaction design
· Ubimus and interaction aesthetics
· Ubimus and modular approaches to sound processing and synthesis
· Design frameworks for ubimus influenced by sonic theories and models: sound-based music, acoustemology, spectromorphology, embedded-embodied music cognition
· Ubimus and phenomenological accounts of musical sound
· Ubimus and participatory design and iterative design frameworks
· Ubimus and sound-based practices: aesthetic frameworks
· The network at the centre: the relational properties of ubimus systems, materialist analyses, and the internet of musical things (IoMusT)
· Ubimus and locative or space-oriented approaches to music making
· Ubimus and immersive technologies; what can ubimus tell us about other cases of interaction and immersion?
· Ubimus and maker, hacker and DIY cultures
· Ubimus and emerging music practices
· Impact of ubimus on musicological approaches to sound art

Obs: note the early submission deadline for proposals to be considered for the OS volume!