As a teenager growing up in northern Virginia in the late 1980s, budding saxophonist and composer Ramberto Torruella faced an important choice.
Take a full ride scholarship to study music composition at Carnegie Mellon University or accept an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.
Torruella picked the Navy, studying physics and sailing into a 30-year career that included stints as a combat systems officer on nuclear submarines and an operations chief managing cybersecurity and complex computer systems across an array of military assets.
But Torruella — who joined choirs wherever he was stationed and more recently picked up the bass guitar — never lost his passion for music.
In August, the 55-year-old took a major career turn — leaving his high-ranking technical post with Department of the Navy to join Seattle’s progressive radio station KEXP as chief technology officer.
Talk about a career shift — from submarines to Sub Pop and dress whites to the White Stripes.
“Jumping to KEXP was an opportunity to get back into my musical roots,” said Torruella, who oversees a technology team of 15. “And I have not regretted it one bit… It has been outstanding.”
We caught up with Torruella — now splitting his time between Washington state and Washington D.C. — in a recent interview to get his take on the new job, his technical roadmap for KEXP, the role of AI in music and ambitions for a new social community at KEXP. Of course, we also had to ask him what he’s listening to these days, too. The conversation was edited for brevity and clarity.
On what drew him to KEXP: “I get to do what I am good at. And what I like to do is work with the back-end technology — everything from the websites and the apps to the broadcast engineering stuff to what the audio engineers need. I mean the whole gamut back there is a playground for me. And what’s neat is I get to do that and I get to be at the coolest radio station on the freakin’ planet.”
On the connection between his engineering mind and his musical mind: “Music is math in time, right? It is precise. Tones are precise. Harmonics are precise. And you can measure harmonics very, very precisely, just like you can, both for engineering purposes.
Music can be just as precise. But the beautiful thing about music and what makes us enjoy it is the mixture of culture, plus some science associated with how harmonies are built, plus the artistic endeavor of a creative person actually putting something together that strums right at your heart.”
On bringing his East Coast military background to a progressive West Coast radio station: “I do have to temper some of my language. And some of my impulses on how to do things, so that I’m not scaring people away. It’s fun. I am sure somebody one day is gonna want to make a sitcom about the East Coast military guy that goes to work for a rock and roll radio station.”
On his technical priorities for KEXP: “The first thing I want to do is bring a little bit of standardization to the backend. There are four technology groups there. And they’ve been kind of running on their own. And I’m trying to bring them all under a unified umbrella of how we do things.
Part of that journey is to make sure that we’ve got a really good lifecycle plan for all the gear, so that we can then forecast out our costs a little bit more accurately. That’s all the boring stuff. If I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be a very good CTO.”
On building a new music-oriented social community: “The most exciting stuff, though, is we’re going to do some really cool things in the social arena and music. The idea is to allow the listeners that we have to be able to connect with each other over shared musical interests, whether that’s a group, or genre or location — allow those listeners to create a digital neighborhood to talk and share stories and perhaps even promote to others who would be interested.”
So essentially a social network? “It is, but social networks almost have a bad name these days, because social networks are really about selling advertising. That’s fine. It’s a great model, it works, people get paid, I get to talk to my friends from high school. But that’s not what we’re interested in here.
We’re interested in supporting music discovery, which is why I freaking love this place. So, I want to leverage that information to enhance the listener experience, so they can share stuff. But that’s only the first part. The second part are the musicians, and to be able to build communities around them, so that listeners can have a little bit more of a direct interaction there.”
Not to date us, but it sounds a bit like the original Myspace? “Myspace wasn’t bad. It was really good for its time. I’ve shared this with the team, and we are taking the first steps towards that. Basically, it’s about making sure that we can capture the listener persona in enough detail that they can create a persona. But I don’t know what that’s going to end up looking like, and we’re going to approach that kind of carefully. And when we do, we will bring everybody along with us. Our goal is not to keep it secret. I just don’t want to over promise and under deliver at this point.”
On how he’s thinking about AI at KEXP: “We’re still talking about it back at the station. It hasn’t been fully decided. What we know: we’re not going to give up our human-curated music selection. That’s almost the special sauce of what KEXP does.
However, there’s no problem with using AI to search metadata for songs to assist the DJs. And figuring out what’s a good selection. We already kind of sort of do that with the tools that we have in the backend, that access our media asset management, and we can improve that access with the use of AI.”
On using AI to combat hate speech: “The other aspect is as we begin to open up a more social experience, I would expect that we would use AI to help filter posts and input so that we can keep the hate speech out. This is about music discovery, it’s about having a place where everybody can feel comfortable to be themselves. But it’s not a place to promote hate or a narrow-minded view of the world. You can set up AI agents to help you with that. Or you can do that with a whole bunch of human beings, filtering off or blocking those things.”
On his leadership approach: “Certainly, I know how to get things done. And I know how to focus and prioritize folks. Anybody that’s come from any kind of management or leadership position can do that.
I think the big difference is a lot of folks think of the military as very regimented. But I drove submarines. And then I worked in communications and networks. And those are smart folks. And yes, we are disciplined, you get the mission done. But I fully expected my sailors to push back if I said something stupid. Or I directed something stupid, that’s expected. In fact, it’s encouraged.
“We used to have a saying on my last boat: don’t be a passenger on your own ship. You own this. You own the mission, just like everybody else does.”
We used to have a saying on my last boat: don’t be a passenger on your own ship. You own this. You own the mission, just like everybody else does. If you see something that’s going south or wrong, or whatever, speak up. That is probably the biggest shock I think, from the guys I’m working with. Because I think they expected me to be very directive. And instead I’m more like, no, ‘what do you think is the right answer?’ Because that’s how I dealt with my sailors.”
On his impressions of Seattleites: “Everybody was super nice. It’s like everyone is backpacking through life up there. And that’s cool, right? I don’t have a problem with that.”
On the power of being surrounded by music lovers every day: “At KEXP, I was happily surprised just how dedicated everybody is to the mission of music discovery. It’s not just a thing. It’s not just a bumper sticker. It’s easy to fall into the group-think of that because everyone is interested in new music. It’s just amazing.”
On discovering new music: “We had a band in the studio, the leader was from Yemen. He lives in Tel Aviv now. But he’s from Yemen. And they played traditional Yemeni songs using traditional instruments that they made out of junk. And it was mind-blowing how good they were. And it was something I’d never heard before. I didn’t think I would be so into it.”
On what he’s listening to right now: “I have an eclectic sense of taste in music. I like everything from country western to punk. I don’t know why we started to do this, but my wife and I have been listening to The Police. What’s even cooler is that I picked up the electric bass. And so I’ve been playing it for a couple of years. I’m good enough to play in a neighborhood dad band, but I’m not good enough to be a studio musician. Sting played the bass, and I’ve been learning his parts in a lot of his songs. I’m trying to get my kids to play King of Pain with me, when they get back home from Christmas. I kind of have an instrumentation because my youngest son plays mandolin, and my daughter at NYU plays the piano. And I think we can do King of Pain with the mandolin, bass and piano and it’ll be kind of something wicked cool, I’m almost certain they’re going to push back.
That’s lately what I’ve been into. But you know, check with me in a couple of weeks, and there’ll be something different.”
