Tracing back through two decades of collaboration, in this paper Cara in South Africa and Galina in the UK reflect on their expanding arsenal of prompt-based sound experiments, the metamorphosis of their understanding of collaborative composition and the meeting points of their current research and how they may be mutually illuminating. As their working relationship adapted to geographical distance, Cara and Galina’s collaborative musical process itself moved away from traditionally scored ABAB band song structures, to long-distance word-based prompts, to inviting others to resample live material in the spirit of overturning and reinterpreting their own creative associations. Today, working in both filmmaking and music, Galina and Cara endeavour to broaden and reorder the chain of events in the workflow of their respective practices, and in doing so embrace experimental systems and the ‘chronically undetermined’ (Rheinberger 2008:14´30˝) nature of epistemic things that come to light.

In this presentation, the practitioners, with their backgrounds in music, documentary storytelling and arts ecology research, reflect on a series of artistic experiments, each evolving from different types of prompts, varying levels of engagement and distributed creativity, and each aiming to interrogate and destabilise the hierarchical, prescriptive role of the solitary contemporary composer. Cara and Galina’s most recent experiments follow simple and scalable matrices across media and collaborators. What might the same prompt sound like at the hands of someone trained vs untrained, a friend vs a stranger, how might an ecological concept be sonified in filmed narrative? How may a documentary mode structure inform a simple song? Each iteration of these experiments has illuminated both starting and ending points for creativity, challenged the hierarchies of auteur vs participant and, above all, aesthetically surprised and enlivened the creative process.