Ronald Bruce Smith studied composition at the University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of California at Berkeley from which he received the Ph.D. in music. He has also studied at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau and at IRCAM in Paris, France, and has held residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts. His principal composition teachers include Tristan Murail, Bruce Mather, Richard Felciano and Talivaldis Kenins. He has also studied computer music and synthesis with David Wessel. In 1996-97 he was a visiting composer at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and since 1998 he has been a composer-in-residence at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley. Smith has taught at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of California at Berkeley and at Stanford University.

The musicologist Beth Levy wrote, "Many of Smith’s works share a contemplative character, a preoccupationwith enhancing the resonance of a given ensemble, and an openness to new sound sources (including non-Western ones). For example, his Kyrie Eleison combines a soprano soloist, orchestra and live electronics in a 'quiet plea for mercy as well as a static prayer for spiritual reflection'; intended as a memorial for the fourteen students murdered at the University of Montreal in December 1989. In Meditations, based on research begun at IRCAM and realized at Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), Smith manipulates materials drawn from Pakistani vocal music and the Indonesian gamelan (percussion orchestra).  His interest in timbral nuance has taken many and diverse forms. In works like 'Remembrances of a Garden' for chamber ensemble, timbral variety comes from dramatic articulations and subtle performance techniques. In his chamber work Flux, he relies on the mathematical exploration of tone color based on the imaginative manipulation of harmonic spectra from the overtone series."

Critics have described Smith’s music as "fresh and lustrous" (The New York Times); "seductive and unique" (Ottawa Citizen); "filling in silences blank canvas with the delicacy of an impressionist’s brush" (Vancouver Sun); "wonderfully evocative"; and "intriguing, lovely and seductive" (San Francisco Chronicle); "a highly charged sonic space, fresh and enigmatic" (Los Angeles Times); "sophisticated and ambitious - fascinating and satisfying" (San Francisco Classical Voice); and as "showing a remarkable sensitivity to tone colors" (Toronto Globe and Mail).

Smith has received many awards and commissions for his work including commissions funded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and Gibson Guitars. Recent performers of his works include the Aitken/Tureski Duo, the Arraymusic Ensemble, California E.A.R. Unit, Cikada, Continuum Ensemble, Del Sol String Quartet, Earplay, Pierrot Ensemble, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Speculum Musicae, Vancouver New Music Ensemble, the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and at festivals in Europe, the Americas and Australia.