We recently connected with Jorge Ramos and have shared our conversation below.
Jorge, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on, so far, is *SOHO*, an orchestral work premiered on 2 July 2025 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) under the baton of Juya Shin.
SOHO was written during a very particular moment in my life. I composed it between December 2024 in Braga (Portugal) and May 2025 in London (UK), at a time when I was physically moving away from London while emotionally still very attached to it. Personal decisions and financial constraints meant leaving a city that had profoundly shaped me, both artistically and personally. This piece became a way of staying — a kind of sonic escapism and a love letter to the London I was carrying with me.
Artistically, SOHO represents a culmination of my academic and creative trajectory so far. It brings together the research I developed during my doctorate at the Royal College of Music — particularly computer-assisted orchestration and AI-informed harmonic systems — with a deeply intuitive, almost diaristic approach to sound. I worked with field recordings from places that were meaningful to me in Soho: underground stations, cafés, jazz clubs, cinemas, churches. Rather than documenting the area literally, I was interested in how memory distorts place — how cities live inside us as fragmented, overstimulated, confabulated impressions.
What made the project especially meaningful was hearing these abstract, personal ideas translated into something emotionally resonant through the orchestra. The LPO didn’t just perform the piece — they inhabited it. Hearing the work described by A Young(ish) Perspective as “less like a concert and more like being dropped inside someone’s dream of London” was incredibly moving, because that was exactly the intention.
SOHO mattered to me because it sits at the intersection of who I am: composer, sound artist, researcher, and listener. It’s where rigorous technological processes meet vulnerability, nostalgia, humour, and loss. In many ways, it marked the end of one chapter of my life and the beginning of another — not just professionally, but personally.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m Jorge Ramos — a Portuguese composer, sound artist, and creative researcher working at the intersection of music, perception, and technology. My practice is self-driven by curiosity: from early encounters with electronic music and sound perception to a decade-long rethinking of how we listen, create, and inhabit sound. I’m deeply interested in psychoacoustics — how we hear and perceive sound — and in reimagining traditional frameworks of composition and orchestration through contemporary technologies.
I began my musical journey in Portugal at the Conservatório de Música Calouste Gulbenkian Braga with classical training, but very early on I found myself asking questions like: *Why do we do things the way they’ve always been done?* That led me to explore not just acoustic composition *as it is*, but *how it could be*, by bridging electronic music, instrumentation, computer-assisted orchestration, machine learning, and artificial intelligence into my work.
I develop creative works that range from orchestral, chamber, choral, electroacoustic, and live-electronics compositions to interdisciplinary performances, installations, and sound-film hybrids. I collaborate with orchestras, ensembles, soloists, and institutions around the world, creating immersive auditory environments that often blend acoustic and synthesized instruments with computationally derived textures and processes.
Rather than seeing composition simply as *notation on paper*, I approach each project like an architect or a filmmaker: asking what idea I want to communicate, what tools best serve that idea, and how the listener will experience it. I use technology not as a gimmick, but as a means to expand expressive possibilities — whether it’s feeding recorded sounds into orchestration software to generate new sonic materials, or designing live systems where human and the machine evolve together.
What sets my work apart is this blend of rigorous research and intuitive storytelling. I’m not bound by traditional genre categories or workflows: I’m comfortable moving between acoustic, electronic, hybrid, and interdisciplinary spaces. My influences aren’t just musical — they come from film, visual art, urban experience, and the way we remember and imagine places. This curiosity fuels work that is conceptually bold, emotionally grounded, and perceptually rich. When I am working, I keep coming back to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorcese, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Ryuichi Sakamoto, amongst many others.
I’m most proud of projects that make listeners embody a wide range of emotions and *question the act of listening* itself — where sound becomes an event that reveals as much about perception as it does about music. Whether it’s a chamber orchestra work in a major hall, a live-electronics piece in an intimate setting, or a museum installation designed to shape how people move through space, my creative mission remains the same: to *push the boundaries of sonic experience* and invite people into new ways of hearing.
For anyone engaging with my work — potential collaborators, audiences, or students — I want them to know that my practice is rooted in authenticity, exploration, and the belief that sound can be a deep and meaningful encounter with perception, memory, and imagination. AUTHENTICITY IS KEY!
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
I used to be very optimistic about this question. However, as my career has developed and I’ve become involved in increasingly large-scale projects, my perspective has shifted. Moving from working privately in the studio for a small number of listeners to collaborating with major institutions, artistic directors, industry professionals, and large public audiences has exposed me to the complex responsibilities and pressures that come with visibility.
We currently live in a world where almost everything that is said or created is open to multiple interpretations — not all of them necessarily accurate or generous; quite often the opposite. Because of this, artists are often encouraged to pre-emptively “narrow” the range of possible readings of their work in order to avoid controversy, or vice-versa! What appears to be safety often demands the sacrifice of one’s inner truth and the very authenticity that gives art its meaning.
Art has always functioned as a mirror of society. Yet today, there is often little space for genuine authenticity, due to political sensitivities, fear of cancellation, or funding systems that prioritise wide-ranging taste, quotas, metrics and optics over artistic necessity. Rather than embracing art as a collective act of self-reflection — something that can simultaneously resonate with some and unsettle others — we increasingly ask it to conform.
These experiences have shown me that supporting a thriving creative ecosystem requires not only trusting artists, but also cultivating a culture of curiosity and discipline: attending art events with the same regularity as a medical check-up, open to whatever unexpected encounter awaits. This means allowing room for complexity, ambiguity, and even discomfort, and recognising that not all meaningful art will be immediately legible or universally agreeable. [I suggest reading/hearing “The Creative Act” by Marcel Duchamp].
As a result, I’ve developed a strong interest in advocating for better arts agency and management from the perspective of working artists — professionals who understand both the creative process and its realities — rather than approaches driven solely by political agendas or spreadsheet logic. Supporting artists means supporting risk, integrity, and long-term cultural value, not just short-term metrics.
This path recently culminated in my acceptance as a Trainee Trustee for Spitalfields Music, enabling me to cultivate a deeper understanding and active role in artistic governance, management, and creative leadership.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
A significant pivot in my life and career occurred in 2020 with the passing of my grandfather. He left everything to his widow and his two grandsons — me and my brother, Dr. João Ramos, a neuroradiologist. This unexpected inheritance required me to step into a completely new role, becoming a co-owner and active participant in the family ventures, including Mandrez, a wine brand in the Porto region of Portugal, and EuroWire, a global fencing manufacturer based in Ponte de Lima, amongst others.
Until then, my career had been focused on composition, sound art, and research. This shift demanded an entirely different set of skills: business management, strategic decision-making, and navigating responsibilities I had never previously encountered. It was a pivotal moment that taught me adaptability, the importance of balancing creative vision with practical realities, and how to embrace unexpected opportunities as catalysts for both personal and professional growth.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jorgefpramos.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jorgefpramos/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jorgefpramos/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgefpramos/
- Twitter: https://x.com/jorgefpramos
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/JorgeFPRamos
Image Credits
© Filipe Abreu
© Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation / Beatriz Cortesão
© Daniel Davis
© Teresa Nunes