Collaborative Music Composition as Virtual Work across Boundaries

The present work is motivated by current thinking on distributed organizing as populated in different engineering disciplines. Specifically, the paper picks on the strand of research concentrating on the sociomateriality of virtual practices and presents results that anchor collaborative music composition as virtual work with, on, through and within digital representations that stand or completely substitute for their physical referents. To illustrate the concepts we discuss components of a system that appropriates cloud-based file sharing and different digital representations of music to facilitate collaborative engagement of musicians in different roles prior to network music performance. The main contribution of this work is that it qualifies collaborative music composition as a creative mix of virtual team work, remote control and simulations.