The ubiquitous nature of communication in computer networks, firmly manifested in the Internet era, provided a context for the introduction of different collaborative tools widely accepted by the on-line community, such as textual chats, white boards, shared editors, video conference systems, shared spaces for the exchange of multimedia documents or even simple e-mail based collaborative systems.

Music today is more ubiquitous, accessible, and democratized than ever. Thanks to technologies such as high-end home studios, audio compression, and digital distribution, music now surrounds us in everyday life, almost every piece of music is a few minutes of download away, and almost any western musician, novice or expert, can compose, perform and distribute their music directly to their listeners from their home studios. But at the same time these technologies lead to some concerning social effects on the culture of consuming and creating music. Although music is available for more people, in more locations, and for longer periods of time, most listeners experience it in an incidental, unengaged, or utilitarian manner. On the creation side, home studios promote private and isolated practice of music making where hardly any musical instruments or even musicians are needed, and where the value of live

Graph Theory links the creative music-making activities of web site visitors to the dynamic generation of an instrumental score for solo violin. Participants use a web-based interface to navigate among short, looping musical fragments to create their own unique path through the open-form composition. Before each concert performance, the violinist prints out a new copy of the score that orders the fragments based on the decisions made by web visitors.

This article examines a number of recent Internet- and network-based audio pieces with a focus on their compositional underpinnings, and the effect of the Internet and networks on the creative process. The process is discussed in excerpts from online interviews with the creators, and the technical and aesthetic goals of the pieces are described. The article concludes with a discussion of the author’s own recent experience composing groundloops: for solo percussion and internet—as well as an attempt to find areas of intersection and differentiation among the approaches discussed.