Creative interactions and improvable digital objects in cloud-based musical collaboration

This paper explores the activities and experiences of musicians using online platforms for collaborative creation. Music-making has always been a collaborative endeavour, and has always evolved to accommodate technological innovations. Consumer-level recording equipment has now made 'home studio' recording at near professional quality levels more accessible than ever before. Combining with new social media platforms, these domestic capabilities have created new possibilities for musicians to collaborate across the globe. Cloud-based platforms mean that collaborators no longer need to be present in the same place at the same time, but these platforms produce new challenges and constraints. This paper explores the infrastructure and community of one specialised cloud-based musical collaboration platform, Kompoz.com. It shows how this site catalyses the creative collaboration of those involved by providing a space for interaction between musicians and temporary 'work-in-progress' digital objects. Commentary on the audio tracks making up a project acts as 'attached dialogue', which facilitates the cumulative reworking of them as 'improvable objects'. It is suggested that despite the inevitable limitations of online collaboration, asynchronous communication has advantages in providing time to reflect and evaluat