Editorial: Ubiquitous Music as a Movement

Throughout the first wave of ubim us initiatives (2007-2014), the theoretical and
methodological undertakings could be described as “patchy” or otherwise messy, and
exploratory. One typical criticism of ubimus proposals was the lack of an explicit
definition of the field. This topic fueled multiple exchanges among ubimus researchers,sometimes with additional contributions from those outside the ubimus community who engaged with the field’s concepts in their own debates; e.g. (Cullimore and Gerhard 2015) on virtuosity in human-computer interactions for composition. A gradual, but increasingly solid, consensus started to form around a notion of ubimus as an ecology or ecosystem of stakeholders and resources supporting creative endeavours (Keller and Lazzarini 2017).

As we reach a decade of what might be described as second-wave ubim us, viewing ubimus as a movement rather than as a strictly bounded discipline or set of related research projects may provide us with a useful conceptual grounding, highlighting features that set it apart from mainstream approaches to music and computing.