Molly Turner
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Ross Williams, Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (1.3° N, 103.8° E)

Before coming to Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Ross Williams was the senior lead instructor in audio production and post-production in the Digital Film and Interactive Media Departments at the Art Institute of New York City. He completed his master’s degree and doctorate in musical arts at Rice University in Houston, Texas. An Australian-born sound designer and composer, Ross has composed music and designed sound for theatre, museum installations, and award-winning independent feature and short films, as well as numerous concert works. His work can be found at fluidsound.com and Vimeo @rossawilliams.

I called Ross while he was in Singapore and I was back home in Seattle. Turns out, we both privately studied with the same professor, Dr. Gottschalk. But besides that, I didn’t know what to expect because he is a professor at a technology institute, not a music conservatory—that is, he is following a nontraditional path for a composer. We first talked about his background in Australia and his introductions to music, then we covered more professional topics like his graduate training at Rice, finding his first jobs, and the projects he’s working on now. We also bonded over bigger picture questions that ask what it means to be a composer or artist and how one finds meaning and work in a field that doesn’t have a set path.

Ross’s time after Rice shows an evolution from the traditional path as a concert composer. Ross was lucky enough to attend Rice to acquire traditional training and great connections, but he stated multiple times he didn’t want to be an “academic composer” or a traditional composer who finds their residency through a university. So, after graduation, he found other outlets for his creativity. He didn’t want to pay an orchestra a whole year’s paycheck to play his piece, so he learned how to mock up orchestras through sound libraries and MIDI playback. Long gone are the monarchy funded orchestras that sponsored many of Mozart’s and Haydn’s works; Ross had to teach himself technological skills and new ways to apply his musical training. He knew he wanted to collaborate with other artists, especially videographers, because he wanted his music to be combined with other types of art. This led him to independent short movies, museums, and audio production.

After he realized he wanted to collaborate, he transitioned into some sound design, which has many connections to music composition. And through his time at the Art Institute and lots of freelancing, Ross acquired a multifaceted career as a sound designer, teacher, composer, and artistic collaborator. Now, at his job in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, he’s doing even more multidisciplinary projects. With his sound design background, he has been working on a volcano infrasound project well outside his designated role as just a sound designer.

Ross’s career path goes to show the tremendous changes the art world has made over the past century, even the past decades. Fifty years ago, before computers and the internet age, composers would go to school to learn to how to write concert orchestra music with pencil and paper, which was very much in the tradition of Beethoven and Mozart. Both Ross’s and my education reflect this tradition. We both learned orchestration techniques, traditional counterpoint and harmony, and how to write for the concert hall. But the concert hall is changing. Only a small demographic listens to classical music, and an even smaller crowd listens to contemporary classical music. It was really inspiring to hear that even though our careers as composers are rooted in the tradition of slow-moving trends, it’s possible in the twenty-first century to break from these trends by working in newly created fields related to our work such as sound design, multidisciplinary collaboration, and museum installations. Composers don’t compose by themselves at a desk and wait for their pieces to be performed; nowadays, they connect with other artists, use their background with sound to cross disciplines, and create music that is relevant to today’s audiences.

Highlights from the Interview

You grew up in Australia. What is the music education like and how did you get introduced to all of that?

Although my parents weren’t musical per se, they very much encouraged us to play instruments. I remember distinctly when I was five or six, my mom said, “Do you want to learn the piano?” and I was like, “Yeah, all right, whatever.” So I started piano lessons when I was pretty young. When I was ten, I was tested for musical facility, and I was recommended to learn another instrument, so I started learning trumpet. The instrument and the lessons were all provided part of the school curriculum. In Australia, certainly when I was growing up, we had sort of specific schools that were public schools that were target schools for music, where they had big programs. The high school I went into wasn’t a target school at that stage. Apparently it is now, but it wasn’t then. So we had no strings, so there wasn’t any possibility of doing strings; it was just basically concert band stuff, woodwinds and things. I played in concert bands all the way through high school. Australia’s generally like that. I mean if you go to private school, of course, then you get all the bells and whistles and orchestras and whatever you want. But in the public schools, specific ones might have string programs but many of them will not because they’re expensive.

Was your undergraduate degree in composition and trumpet?

I never had any intention of studying music at a high level. I originally started in biotechnology doing genetics, but when I realized biotech wasn’t for me, I took a one-year course in music at the conservatory of music as a trumpet major. I thought, “All right, this is cool. I like it. Let’s see where it goes.” I enrolled in the music education program and found out that they were starting a composition program, so I switched immediately to composition. So I never actually did trumpet as part of my bachelor’s; I was only a composer from then on.

How did you hear about Rice?

The teacher I started studying with asked, “What are you going to do when you graduate?” And I’m like, “I dunno,” like everybody does who does composing. So he said, “Have you thought about studying for your next degree in the US?” And I was like, “Eh not really, but why not? Let’s think about it.” So I applied to a number of places on his recommendations, and Rice was one that I got accepted into. When I got to Rice, I was like, “Wow! That’s an amazing building.” And it took me only a little while to realize how lucky I’d gotten getting into Rice as opposed to maybe some of the other places I may have gone to.

I looked at some of your work, and I was just wondering if you were doing all of those video collaborations and multi-media work at your time at Rice?

No, not really. When I was at Rice, I was just composing. I came from a background of a lot of electronic—not electronic music in terms of pop compositions stuff but as in I had bands in high school, and I was the keyboard player—and I grew up with computers. My dad built a computer in 1978 so I always had sort of tech side of things going on, but I never liked to use any of that in my music while I was in Rice. I have a bit of an aversion to any sort of electronic music, really, in certain contexts. If I’m going to a concert, I want to see people moving; I don’t want to hear buttons.

When I got out of Rice and I got my first teaching job, it was in a multimedia program. I was teaching sound. And, actually, going back one step, when I was at Rice doing my doctorate, Professor Gottschalk was teaching at a place called the Art Institute of Houston. He was teaching a sound course. He stopped doing it and asked, “Would you like to take over this course for me?” And I’m like, “All right, whatever.” So I taught about a year and a half there, and then I went to New York. They were starting that same program, so I just fell into that job there. I’ve only taught in media, and now I teach film.

When I left Rice, I only had a portfolio of just regular concert music. I built a whole other career that’s peripheral to what I studied, although related in a lot of ways. Because on some levels, sound is sound whether it’s music or anything else. When you’re organizing sound in space and time, then there are certain concepts that cross over all of them. While I was in New York, I met a lot of people who wanted music for things or sound design for things. So I just kept getting asked, “Can you do this?” Or I did some theater stuff, or I did some other things. So then when I met all these people, image people, were like, “Can we collaborate?” and I’m like, “Sure.” So I just end up doing these things based on relationships and then contacts and then people heard something and asked me to do it, and then I slipped more into film.

The problem I had as a composer for a long time, and I still have a little bit, is if I’m writing concert music, I always ask, “Why am I doing this? For who am I doing this?” I’ve got a little burned out. I didn’t want to be an academic composer. I didn’t want to write music for other composers. Why write something purely on it’s own anymore? Mind you, if someone said, “Hey Ross, write me an orchestra piece.” I’d be like, “Absolutely.” I would do it. But those things don’t happen. Least not—especially if you’ve chosen the path I’m on.

Sounds like you are “the” sound guy at the Nanyang University.

Anytime there’s a mention of the word “sound,” everyone looks at me. Which is cool in the sense that I just submitted a paper to a big journal on volcano infrasound that I did some work with some volcanologists on processing their infrasound so they can detect volcanoes more accurately, which is very peripheral. It started off with just a “Hey you’re a sound guy. I work with infrasound. Can you listen to this stuff and let’s chat.” And I’m listening to it, and I’m like, “This sounds horrible. Let me clean it up for you.” And they’re like, “Woah!” And that led to this whole research project. So that’s been fun, because if I was only writing music I think I’d get a little nuts, but if I was only doing non-music I’d get nuts. If I’m writing music, I’m always thinking, “I’m glad when this music’s done so I can do something else.” But then when I’m doing something else, I’m like, “I really feel like I should be writing music.” So I like that I have the freedom to do one or the other. The only problem is, of course, you get pigeonholed. You can’t be good at either of them because you’re doing two things.

It was really exciting to hear that you did a project where you had complete artistic freedom, because my impression is that rarely happens.

That’s the good thing about academia is I can just do. I take projects or leave them. I’m not required to do them. I don’t have to feed my family based on the outcome of them. Not all of them, of course. Some of them I have battles with directors—more purely narrative films will go into battle over certain pieces of music or the way that they’re written. The funny thing is, I’m almost always battling, telling them not to use music. I’m always like, “You don’t need music in this part of the film.” Because there’s a tendency for overuse of music in general; from my aesthetic, it’s used way too much. And the effectiveness of the music is diminished. The more you have, the less effective it is.

You learned all of these notation things in grad school, and how to write an orchestra piece, and what instruments are. But now when you do all of these multimedia things, how do you acquire the skills to learn Pro Tools or learn Logic? Is that you at the computer figuring it out?

It’s funny, I joke with all my students. I tell them I’ve never had a film sound class. I’ve never had any class on what I teach my students. I suffer like all of us do, me maybe more than some, with the imposter syndrome. You know, I’ve never taken a specific class in this subject that I’m now teaching you. But I’ve been, the last twelve years, working in it and reading papers and going to conferences and all those other things. But yeah, it’s all self-taught on some level. That’s sort of going back to composition. I’ve always loved orchestra and orchestration, and sound design for film is essentially an orchestration or activity on some levels. Am I adding wind here or something there. I’m trying to affect your emotional state or direct you in an emotional state or direct you in a certain way, which is very much what we do in an orchestra. So there’s a parallel there, at certain levels, of the skill set I think have brought across. When I say that no one taught me what I’m doing, that’s not 100 percent true. I took orchestration classes. Although they weren’t directed at that specific outcome, there’s an aesthetic or a sensitivity that you develop through that process that comes to bear on other things.

I think I’ve always been reasonably good at picking stuff up. Like we all do. You know if someone says—as a composer especially, as you probably know, you never say no to anything. If someone says, “Can you do this?” You always say, “Yeah.” And then you say, “How am I going do this?” and then you work it out or you get some help. So that was sort of how my entire life has gone, I think. I should have said no to a few more things, but—well, actually, that’s not true. Keep saying yes and then it forces you into places that you might not have wanted to go. And then sometimes you go, and you’re like, “Eh, that maybe wasn’t worth the while, but that’s all right.” And then you’ve done something else.

It does mean a lot of background research. Like I don’t have a background in volcanology, and I’m never going to acquire a background in volcanology. Though I need to know just enough of these certain things to be able to apply. But also, you can have ideas that you don’t have to execute—that’s another thing. You can have an idea and say, “Why don’t we try this?” And you don’t know how to do it, but that’s where you get somebody else to help you with it. And that’s something—as composers, we are very used to being very solitary. We do it, we write it, we notate it. 

The genius of you sitting at the desk and penciling it out…

It can be a little lonely. I still like to do that. I’m writing a string quartet right now, which is going to be actually one of my first concert pieces for ages. It’s going to be that, and it’s going to be mixed media in the sense that the sound from the quartet would control images behind the quartet, but there’s no processing of the quartet. It’s just a regular quartet. And this is the first one I’ve written for ages, and I’m lonely writing it. I’m still looking around—like pencil and paper and doing my stuff—and thinking there’s nobody to bounce this idea off of. That’s good on some levels because it forces you back into that world of writing music. I still like writing with pencil and paper…in this case a little keyboard. Even though I’ve got all the gear to realize it digitally, if I want to, I try to hold that off until it’s mostly written.

At the end of the day, nobody cares how you wrote the music if they like the piece. That’s the thing. I think, as the student especially, it’s valuable. But I don’t know if they’re doing it yet—maybe they are at Rice—but it’s a hugely important skill to be able to do really good mock-ups of any special orchestral pieces. To be able to realize them with modern sample libraries, which is pretty extraordinary. Being able to mock up your pieces is hugely useful. Because, let’s face it, we are heading down a path where more and more of the music you hear is going to be sample-based. I mean you go to an orchestra—all right, that’s going to be an orchestra.

Can you talk a little bit about how you ended up in Singapore? Because I think that’s crazy.

After I left Rice, I had one year left on my student visa so I went to New York with my friend Bram who was also at Rice. I was working as a waiter and trying to work out what I wanted to do. The art institute I had worked at in Houston started one in New York, so they needed somebody to teach. That got me into a teaching job. Eventually I became full-time and they got me visas. So I spent a lot of years there working and developing the film side and the multimedia side of my music and sound design and all that sort of things. Later, when they were closing that school, I went online and looked for jobs. There was a job at the Berklee College of Music of music in music production and composition, which I was shortlisted for and I almost got that one. Fortunately I didn’t because if I had gotten it, I probably would have taken it even though it didn’t pay very well. Then I saw the Singapore job online—and it was one of those rare ones where you look at everything they ask for and it was everything that I was doing. In New York I was a founding instructor in their film department, so I helped write the curriculum and all that, and they were looking for someone to revamp their curriculum here from the sound part. I just hit all the right things, and then obviously…also having a doctorate from Rice did not hurt at all…There’s a lot of people who work at sound for film who don’t have a PhD or DMA. I mean, there’s probably more now…but certainly, not many with as much practical experience as I’ve had as well. And my sister was living in Singapore. She had been for the last twenty-five years. So I knew it well, so I was like, “All right, I like Singapore.” It’s on the equator so it’s never winter. And it’s only five hours from my home in Perth. It was attractive on a lot of levels. Singapore is a young county and they’re really only recently developing their creative arts, so it was an interesting place. The film creative area is growing, establishing itself so it was sort of fun to be part of that process, and then the money is really much better too, as well. They pay quite well. The sad thing in the US is that most of the faculty type jobs, unless you’re in one of the big schools, do not pay well.

What advice would you give to yourself when you were college age?

I think the only advice I would give is try not to say no to anything. I’ve always had good friends and good colleagues so opportunities seem to pop up here and there. But opportunities also come through connections you make and just being easy to work with and also doing good work. So I would say to try to look at what you actually want to do, because you’ve got to be realistic. Like I had no intention—even when I was finishing my doctorate, I knew that I wasn’t going to be an academic composer. I knew that I wasn’t going to get a job in a university as a composer.

I think maybe I applied for one or two things as I left, but I knew that for various reasons…I think I wasn’t strong enough on the theory side of things. I had no problem with my actual music writing, but I wasn’t a natural theorist. I’m a pretty crap conductor. So I was like, “You know what, let me work on my strengths.” So I think having sort of a clear idea of where you might want to go is important. As we know with music…I often joke with this friend of mine…The thing about music is that if every composer in the world stopped writing music right now, nobody in the world would know. Nobody would know for…who knows how long, nobody would know. And that’s not to say that what we’re doing doesn’t have value, but it says in the pecking order of things, it’s a fairly rarified life that an academic composer gets to enjoy. And those positions, there aren’t very many of them, so if you want that then think about all the things you need to get there. You’ve got to be going to competition after competition after competition. You’ve got to be really, really great at all your theory and maybe conducting. You’ve got to know people. All of those things. It’s all right to do all of those things, but you’ve got to do those at the very beginning. That was something at Rice, I think, that was maybe lacking a little bit, that discussion. How are you going to get that first job, and what is that first job going to be? Because the first job is the big one, because that tends to be where you end up moving in terms of your first professional job in your field. Where I ended up working, well, sure enough, I ended up staying within that lane, or branched out,. Had I got the job, say, at Berklee instead of here, then I would have probably shelved all the sound design stuff and had to go purely into music again. I don’t know if I would have been happy doing that. But that’s sort of a complicated answer now. We’re all different, and it’s a super glib and easy thing to say to do what makes you happy. But happiness is not guaranteed by anybody. I’ve always been lucky in the sense that my happiness is not derived from what I do. It’s derived from just being alive and having a family and that kind of stuff, so I could have been happy probably doing a bunch of other things too. I’m lucky I wrangled it somewhere.

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)