“I started to rethink how I listen to music — if it makes sense to do things the exact same way as they have been [done] for the past two hundred years. So for the past decade, I’ve been reframing my way of working, my way of perceiving things in our world — perceiving sound.”
Jorge Ramos
Jorge Ramos is a multi-award-winning Portuguese composer currently based in the UK. With an interest in perception and psychoacoustics, Jorge’s musical approach explores the intersection of technology and orchestration, with a focus on electronic-informed orchestration, instrumental synthesis, computer-assisted orchestration, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Jorge is currently a London Philharmonic Orchestra 2024-25 Young Composer, an ORA Singers Graduate Composer 2024, and was an ENOA Composer in Residence from 2017-19; commissioners and collaborators include the Banda Sinfónica Portuguesa, Calouste Gulbenkian Orchestra, Arte no Tempo, and The Hermes Experiment, among many others. Jorge recently received a doctorate from the Royal College of Music, supervised by Gilbert Nouno, Alison Kay, and Diana Salazar, and previously studied at the Conservatório de Música Calouste Gulbenkian de Braga and Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. Jorge currently serves as a mentor on The ACTOR Project (CAN) and CESEM Lisbon (PT).
We sat down with Jorge Ramos at the National Theatre, Southbank, and discussed his involvement with The ACTOR Project, working with technology-assisted orchestration, deconstructing sound, rethinking tradition, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Jorge! Thanks for joining me today. We’re chatting following the culmination of your DMus at the Royal College of Music…
I was doing a DMus — which is practice-led research — on Technology and Orchestration. I had support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Royal College of Music, amongst some other occasional awards and funding for specific artistic projects. I don’t want to call it “lucky” — I don’t really believe in “luck” in that sense — but most of my works were commissioned by performers or institutions during my DMus. What I recommend [though] is: really, really be strategic with your doctorate. You will spend four or five years doing it, and it may be a good launching pad for other endeavours. If you don’t enjoy it, if you don’t like it, it won’t be worth the time and investment.
Tell me a bit about how, and why, you decided to do a doctorate — and what was it about London and RCM that appealed to you?
I was planning on doing some research on computer-assisted technology. And I knew I wanted to spend time writing these works — so I decided I might as well do a doctorate and get the diploma. I was planning on going to IRCAM — my aesthetic does suit IRCAM, and my girlfriend is French — but they wanted me to do everything in French. -laughs- Then I saw [an] opportunity in the States, and I decided I didn’t want to move to the States. I had Asia, and Switzerland, [and] I also didn’t want to move to Asia; and then it was between Switzerland and [the] UK.
I came here in 2013, to visit the Academy and College… I really liked College for a bunch of different reasons. When I was deciding, I found out that Gilbert Nouno — a former IRCAM researcher — was teaching at College. So, I got in touch with the RCM. I wasn’t offered a place at first, so I spent a year freelancing and singing in Lisbon — in the Gulbenkian Choir — to get some money to come to London. Then I did the interview again; I had the same project, but I had more work to show, and more experience. And both the RCM and Gilbert knew my project inside out. Once I got in, Gilbert said “your project is very similar [to] what I’m doing with the ACTOR Project” — and he sponsored my membership in the ACTOR Project. I was doing everything; [I was] even the student rep in the executive committee. Now, I’m not allowed to be a student rep anymore… -laughs- So I’m a collaborator, peer reviewer, and I mentor a couple of PhD candidates.
As a doctoral candidate, I had one of the most rewarding experiences of my career to this day. I found a wonderful team of supervisors that I really can’t thank enough — Alison Kay, Diana Salazar and Gilbert Nouno — as well as some other staff that provided me with the skills to succeed in research, teaching, and public speaking. I am super proud of what we were able to achieve!
Tell me a bit more about The ACTOR Project. You’ve been working with them throughout your DMus; what is the project researching, and what’s your role been within the organisation?
The ACTOR Project is an international transdisciplinary partnership project based at McGill University in Canada, that aims to bring timbre and orchestration to the forefront of scholarship, practice, and public awareness, through collaborations among world-class artists, humanists, and scientists. It was born out of the interest of many parties in moving composition and orchestration forward in the era of technology.
Like I mentioned, I got involved with ACTOR thanks to Gilbert’s sponsorship, and I knew I had to make the most of it. I showed up to every seminar, conference, and workshop I could. I shared my research, joined in on discussions, and contributed ideas—and from there, things just naturally fell into place. I met some like-minded artists and software developers that caught my interest, Stephen McAdams — the brain of modern definition[s] of “timbre”, and the founder of the ACTOR Project — taught Gilbert!
My work fit in right away. I was introduced to Carmine-Emanuele Cella — an Italian composer based at UC Berkeley and the lead developer of Orchidea [computer-assisted orchestration software] — and Daniele Ghisi, the developer of bach for notation within MaxMSP. So I was meeting all of these well-known figures of our world; they’re all super friendly, super available to help. Everything that I was doing as part of my DMus I was feeding [to] ACTOR — scores, recordings, research. What they are trying to do is establish a common terminology to refer to the way of working with timbre; the way of orchestration in the twenty-first century. They have a yearly mentorship scheme, as well. Last year I got the privilege of being mentored by Roger Reynolds, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer — and now I’m one of the mentors. I am on my second PhD student that I’m mentoring. It’s a wonderful network.
How did you first get involved with research into computer-assisted orchestration — what made you first interested in this line of work?
That’s a really interesting question. I was classically trained in Portugal. I went to Calouste Gulbenkian Conservatoire, in Braga, in the north of Portugal — which was, at the time, very focused on classical traditions [of] composition and performance. I spent twelve years there. At the age of 13, 14, you start to get composition classes — and at the age of 15, you decide if you want to pursue composition. Just as a kid! Once I got the list of modules I was going to be doing, I noticed electronic music. At the time, I wanted to be a minimalist composer like John Adams, or Philip Glass… In the same year, I went to Semibreve Festival — the first edition. I consider myself [to be] a curious guy, so I tend to buy tickets for concerts [where] I don’t know what I’m going to hear, I go to movies without reading anything about it — so I bought the full pass for this festival. This festival is quite diverse in styles of electronic music: everything from acousmatic music, to performance art, to VR — performers such as Ryoji Ikeda, Kali Malone, Alva Noto, Caterina Barbieri, Beatriz Ferreyra, and Morton Subotnick, amongst many others.
Was there anything in particular about electronic music that you felt inspired by in your compositional outlook?
I like to challenge myself. Each work is like a “game”: can you write a work for two pianos, [or] six harps? And I was like “I don’t know, let’s try”. As time went by, I started to rethink how I listen to music — if it makes sense to do things the exact same way as they have been [done] for the past two hundred years. So for the past decade, I’ve been reframing my way of working, my way of perceiving things in our world — perceiving sound. There’s a lot of things that we know, and we get taught when we are learning music, as “rules” or “facts” without questioning them. But once we start questioning hard facts — such as “pitch” — we see that more often than not, it doesn’t make sense to write twelve-tone music for [certain] concepts. Or sul ponticello because that’s what Shostakovich was doing almost one hundred years ago. I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to question things.
It’s really interesting to think about — as someone who didn’t come from a “traditionally” taught classical background myself…
I try not to care about the ensemble that is playing, in terms of my conceptual process. At the beginning I tend just to focus on the “story” and in what way I want to tell it — my point of view/perception of it. I just have an idea of what I want to portray — like that ever comes easy — and then it’s a matter of balancing. How can I make use of everything that we have available? How can I leverage that to enrich my practice, the narrative, and the musicians’ approaches, creating a stronger connection to the audience’s reception of the original “message”?
I’m always struck by how many orchestras and institutions claim to be moving with the times — commissioning (just) a handful of new works, embracing contemporary sensibilities, and striving to present themselves as “up-to-date” institutions — yet simultaneously continue to perform with nearly 200-year-old instruments, in the same configurations, venues, and traditions as before. I see no reason why their instruments and practices shouldn’t evolve alongside other aspects of their work. If not, shouldn’t we be discussing the idea of these institutions operating more like musical museums, libraries, or repositories for past works?
Nina Simone said “an artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times” — and I couldn’t agree more. I am not trying to say that every artist must be politically engaged by focusing on current societal, economic or other issues. I merely feel that one should tell a story from his/her point of view — meaning that you can dwell on real-life or fictitious topics by having an authentic point of view. That’s what drives me: authenticity and getting to know more about the artist’s way of thinking, and crafting process through experiencing his/her own work. Authenticity is key!
I understand that kind of revisiting, or rethinking, of tradition is also present in your research for RCM?
I’m really interested in psychoacoustics and perception. And that’s in everything — the compositional experience, the performance experience, the audience experience. I was finding out that notation is outdated, instruments are outdated, creative process is outdated. The industry is outdated; you go to your studio, you write the work, and you deliver the score. So I was trying to find my own strategies to navigate all of that. [I prefer] working more like an architect, where [each] project is a different canvas: the terrain is different, the environment is different, you get highly involved with who is commissioning you and for when and how. Probably that couple will live in that house — [and so] the ensemble will perform the work one, two, ideally ten or twenty times. Are they resident of a concert hall? If so, how can I embrace the acoustics of the space in my work, and how can I experience it differently from different places in the audience?
How would you say you’d define your relationship with this technology — or how you work with technology?
It was a challenge that I really like, and I’m still enjoying. Computer-assisted orchestration is just a tool — like using your camera app instead of a film camera. So I don’t see why composers — in general, it’s a big generalisation — have to relinquish the use of something just out of pride. For example, it happens with Sibelius; a lot of composers, especially old school composers, [say] “oh, I don’t use Sibelius [or] Finale, I’m old school, I write with pen and paper” — like that was a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a different process, you know? It doesn’t make you [a] better composer, because you use pen and paper. I don’t see why you would relinquish modern technology to achieve greater things. No one does that in medicine; if you need technology that helps you survive, you just use it. So I was like, why are we being so stubborn about our process?
As I was very classically trained — and then went to RCM — I started to deconstruct in my own way the idea of “genius”: how to become a genius. Like, “Bach is a genius, Mozart is a genius, Schönberg is a genius” — everyone seems to agree on that — but whenever you ask someone “why do you think Bach is a genius?”, more often than not they don’t know how to tell you. That’s another thing I faced in my composition path; I was being taught in a way to perceive these composers as being “geniuses” — almost like sanctification that I couldn’t question. And on the other hand, I am not a big fan of their music. -laughs- So I was struggling with this idea. Then I had some interesting professors and mentors who told me: you can dislike anything that you want to, but you have to at least acknowledge why you don’t like it.
Of course. I feel like the way some classical institutions mythologise the “canon” is so destructive, and has a detrimental effect on how we learn and perceive certain musical techniques…
In my Masters degree, I studied with Carlos Caires. He’s the developer of this micro-orchestration software called IRIN; I decided to do my Masters with him because he’s huge in electronic [music]. He was one of the first ones to tell me: you can buy a delay plugin, a granulator plugin, a reverb plugin, everything — but that way, you’re just learning how to use premade tools that someone made for you. What he did to me was, if I wanted to use a granulator, I needed to know how to code my own granulator; the same with delay, reverbs, etc.
During my undergrad, I didn’t finish a single work with him. Just because he kept throwing interesting topics and concepts at me, every time I finished the topic before. During my first year, he was like “do you know what ring modulation is?” — and I’d be doing research, [making] my own ring modulator — and by that time I finished my own ring modulator, he came back with a different thing and started all over again.
While I guess it could be frustrating, I do understand the idea — to really get into the fundamentals of what makes that sound that sound.
When I was [in] high school, one of my first composition teachers [André Ruíz] took us outside — in a really busy area in my hometown — and he was just like: “Grab a pen and paper, come with me for fifteen minutes. Now sit here for five minutes, [and] you will write down every sound that you hear in your book.” So I was hearing cars, people talking, everything — I was writing them down. Then he told me “do the exact same thing, but now with your eyes closed.” I did the exact same thing, [and] the list doubled or tripled.
After the list tripled, he was like “now tell me the qualities of the sounds that you heard.” If they were pitch-based, noise-based, long tones, percussive. Then we had a discussion, and then he [said] “let’s create some boxes, because some of those sounds share characteristics — and let’s try to add ‘tags’ to these sounds.” [If you] analyse these sounds in a spectrum analyser, why are these sounds noisy, percussive, and such?
I was taught to hear sound like that. So now when I hear something, at the same time I’m hearing, I’m deconstructing the process to recreate it — independently of if it’s good or bad. I later found out some connections with Luigi Russolo’s L’Art des Bruits: Manifeste de 1913. I always recommend this training to my students, and afterwards, it can be practiced freely in everyday settings — such as when walking, travelling, or engaging in a soundwalk.
For me, art doesn’t have to be good or bad. It really depends on the artists’ intentions, the authenticity of what you want to convey. Or as Marcel Duchamp said at the Meeting of the America Federation of the Arts in April 1957, also known as The Creative Act: “What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion.”
When you’re composing, or working with software, where do you start with the quality of sound in your compositional process?
That really depends from project to project. I’m very influenced by other arts, not so much by music; I know more things about music, so there are fewer things that impress me in music than in other arts… -laughs- I’m highly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, Depeche Mode, Ron Mueck, Giorgio De Chirico in art, amongst others.
For example, the London Philharmonic Orchestra season is based around the topic of memory; within the topic of memory, I had to find my own point of view. I’m always interested in this blurring of perceptions, and realities, and how art can help us achieve that. I don’t really like boundaries. So what I decided to go with is the topic of confabulation, which is a thing your brain does.
Essentially — I’m being very reductive — when you go through a certain trauma, either emotional or physical, your brain has the capacity to make up memories. You feel like you’re recalling past experiences, but your brain can be generating memories for you as a defense mechanism. The difference between that and dreams is: in a dream, you acknowledge that it’s not real, [but] in this scenario, you remember false information in vivid detail, often claiming to relive the event. It must have happened to you — you remembered some scenario [and] you think someone was there, and in reality that person wasn’t there.
So I’m using computer-assisted orchestration to generate orchestration solutions from recorded sounds. Once I get the suggested scores, usually highly unperformable by humans, from the computer, I make sure to “transcode” it into readable notation and add a whole other layer of my own orchestration practice onto it. So I’m using [a] real memory generated from the computer, and adding bits and bobs on top of it.
So in a nutshell, you’re feeding the software your own recordings — and the software generates an orchestrated score from those recordings, which you’re then using as a foundation for your own orchestration…
I’m a strong believer in using everything available to you that makes you sound more authentic and truer to yourself. More often than not, that is not achieved by buying a £600 sample library. If you just go with your iPhone to Southbank [or any location], and record any sound and use it — you’ll notice that that will be your sound, and not the sound of a thousand composers on Spotify. So, quality and authenticity are not directly related to the cost of the tools that you are using.
But of course, there’s a hidden cost — and that’s the cost of personal investment. I put a lot of time and effort in learning the tools I develop, or that I use. I insist on learning these tools [in order] to work with them the way they are supposed — and not supposed — to be used. Some interesting results can be achieved when using a mixer to generate feedback, instead of mixing sounds. It’s not “circuit bending”, because I don’t do that yet; but more perverting the way tools were designed to function. And using all that is available to you to enhance everything. “Enhancing” isn’t about composing a thirty-minute piece instead of a five-minute one, or writing for eighty musicians rather than five, or using a £3000 synthesizer instead of a basic software plug-in.
To talk about an example of your computer-assisted orchestration — you recently collaborated with saxophonist Ricardo Pires on ‘Keep Up!’…
That’s a really, really funny piece. During covid, Ricardo called me. You know, one of the oldest alliances in the world is between Portugal and the UK [the Treaty of Windsor]; so he was asked to do a project of commissioning and performing works from Portuguese composers that came to the UK — and the other way around, because we have a lot of British people in Portugal.
He called me, and wanted a five-minute piece for saxophone. He told me the rest of the programme, and for me, everything sounded like another Sibelius score with fixed electronics. Initially, I was supposed to do a piece for a score and fixed electronics; [but] during my walks here at Southbank, I decided [to] call him and say I don’t want fixed electronics — I want live electronics. And he was like “oh shit — how am I going to perform live electronics when you are not available to travel with me?” So I [decided to] write in a way that the computer uses the amplitude (i. e. volume) analysis of his [the performer] sound in real-time — and based on some data scaling algorithms, the computer can “perform” the electronics in real-time according to an algorithm developed by myself.
More walks followed, and I was testing more computer-assisted orchestration software. I had briefly used it in a piece for the Calouste Gulbenkian Orchestra — ‘Point of Departure’ — to orchestrate an acousmatic piece. So I was like: it would be funny to show people how this works, and not just saying that “it works”. So I called him, and said: remember you said you wanted something different — what if you had a live score, as well?
Oh, wow — how did he react to that?
He was like “oh fuck”… -laughs- “Are you sure you want to do this to me? Because I don’t want to look like a fool if I get things wrong”… And I’m like, that’s exactly the purpose of this piece! That’s why it is called ‘Keep Up!’; as the piece progresses, the software gets more complex, and complicated. The score goes from very slow in the beginning, to very chaotic by the end.
The way the piece works is: every five seconds, it records the sound in the room — and based on the sound in the room, it cross-references that spectral analysis with the sound of a saxophone recorded in an anechoic chamber [recorded at IRCAM]. Based on those analogies, it cross-references both and tries to come up with an orchestration. Then the saxophone plays that score, and it feeds back into the next recording. But if he makes a mistake, the mistake is incorporated in the recording. So by the end of the seven minutes, all the five-second mistakes and differences in recording leads to an insane, chaotic [score].
I pushed it to seven minutes — but when I reached seven minutes, the software was just going. I spent quite some time trying to think of ways [of] how to finish the piece; you can’t just finish the piece like a normal piece, with a cadenza. So I was like, no — let’s give a chance to the computer, as well. -laughs- After seven minutes, the computer has free will to either keep going or terminate the piece. Every time a slap or a fortissimo is played, the computer tosses a coin and decides [whether] to keep going or finish.
At this point, I’m imagining there’s a whole load of fortissimo moments in each repeat.
Yes. So it usually doesn’t go longer than eight minutes. But also, to the performer, [it is] unbearable to play longer than seven or eight minutes; the score is full of demisemiquavers, and each note can have different articulations, like slap [or] multiphonics. It’s just a matter of trying to keep up with the software. Conceptually, it’s that idea that human and machine can work together — but they can also be contestants. One is trying to beat the other. It was a nightmare to record that in the studio… -laughs-
The question that I have on that is: it’s not the score or even one performance that’s the “work”, but the software, right? So to perform the work, you’d just need the program…
In theory, yes. But behind the algorithm, there’s loads of decisions you make to constrain it during performance. And also, the spectral database that you give the software; you can record your own database, or you can record someone else. So it becomes very close to your concept because you are generating everything. The algorithm is software — but it was taught by you, and made to work in a way [that] you’ve designed it. It has free will, within certain limit[s] or constraints. In a way, it’s pretty similar to a notation-based score. Both are a combinatory result of pre-defined instructions to produce a given sound; however, none of these approaches have direct and specific control over the produced tone quality, and both of them require a performance to be brought into the audible domain. The difference lies in the notation approach, and not on the definition of what makes this software a musical work. Again, technology is just a tool, a means to an end.
So I guess on a larger scale — how would you say you channel your musical, extramusical, and electronic influences into your own compositional aesthetic?
I really like when people say “what are your influences?” Exactly as I told you — rarely [is] it someone from music. It seems interesting, to them, that most of my references are from other arts or other aspects of life, and not from music — as if it’s a rule for you, to become a musician, [to] be influenced firstly by music. I don’t think so. When I hear a well-known work, or piece of music, I immediately deconstruct the sound — and I occasionally get to a conclusion of “I know how to do that, I just didn’t do it.” It doesn’t get me [as] challenged, or excited, as watching a Hitchcock film and saying “fuck, I don’t know how to do that” — but I want to try to do that with music! It’s the thrill of the challenge and the “insecurity” of not being immediately comfortable in saying that I can do that. There’s a really interesting take on this by David Bowie: “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
This cross-fertilisation between art, people, sciences… There’s lots of things that you can extract from essentially anything. Even cooking. I had a composition teacher [João Madureira] that almost always taught while referencing cooking terms: “Don’t put pineapple on top of cream” — and pineapple could be the oboe, and the cream could be the vibraphone.
I love this analogy. It kind of goes into what you’ve been researching with the ACTOR Project, in terms of creating a terminology for computer-assisted orchestration technologies…
Yes — that’s one of the branches of The ACTOR Project. A lot of people seem to be talking about “bright” sound, “harsh” sound, “dull” sound, whatever… but sometimes, “bright” can mean the same as “harsh”, the same as “warm”, or “rough”. So, the same word can have widely different meanings depending on one’s perceived meaning of these terms. [Musicians] often lack the knowledge to see the inner workings of sound in order to agree on the utilization of a common dictionary of text-to-sound terminology, and to know what makes these sounds bright, warm, or harsh. So, ACTOR is trying to get [to] a consensus on what orchestration is in the 21st Century. If we start to write and orchestrate music that way — [while] also pairing music with other art forms — we will push things a lot further than where they are now.
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Learn more about Jorge Ramos and his practice at:
- https://jorgefpramos.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/JorgeFPRamos
- https://www.instagram.com/jorgefpramos/
Learn more about The ACTOR Project:
References/Links:
- Nina Simone, TV interview (c. 1960s)
- Luigi Russolo, L’Art des Bruits (1913)
- Marcel Duchamp, The Creative Act (1957)
- The Treaty of Windsor, Britannica
- David Bowie, interview with the BBC (2002)
