Current musical practices point to convergent research trends that bring together eco-composition, cooperative composition, mobile music and networked music. We present results of three compositional studies devised to test three musical interaction metaphors for ubiquitous computing contexts: the cup metaphor, time tagging and spatial tagging. These metaphors were developed through a conceptual and methodological framework that places compositional activities within the context of software development. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our approach and propose ubiquitous music as a frame of reference for this type of research.