Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani (born June 4, 1946) is an American musician, sound designer, composer, and record label executive who found early success in the 1970s with her innovative electronic music and sound effects for films and television commercials. Her career has included works with Quadraphonic sound. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best New Age Album five times. Her success with electronic music has her dubbed "Diva of the Diode" and "America's first female synth hero". Ciani was born in an army hospital in Indiana. She was raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, a southern suburb of Boston. She has four sisters and Italian roots. Her father was a physician and she started to play the piano at six. From 1964 to 1968, Ciani studied traditional liberal arts at Wellesley College in nearby Wellesley where she received classical music training. She also took evening classes, one of which was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is where she first learned about music technology. She cites German photographer Ilse Bing as a big influence, who provided lyrics and drawings to her track "Lumière", along with classical music composers and pianist Glenn Gould A Buchla 200 modular synthesizer Ciani studied for a master's degree in composition at University of California, Berkeley from 1968 to 1970. In her first year, she met synthesizer inventor and pioneer Don Buchla through her boyfriend at the time, and became highly influenced by his analog modular synthesizer, the Buchla, then a competitor of the Moog synthesizer by Bob Moog. She spent time with a Buchla synthesizer in a rented studio at the tape music center at Mills College in Oakland, paying $5 for each visit. She took a summer course in acoustics, the psychology of acoustics, and computer music at Mills where she was taught by composer Max Mathews and worked at Stanford University in the Artificial Intelligence Lab. After graduating from Berkeley, Ciani took up work at the San Francisco Tape Music Center to earn enough money for a Buchla synthesizer of her own, the Buchla 200. There she "Sat and soldered joints and drilled holes for three dollars an hour. When the synthesizers were finished, tested and shipped off, I felt as though I were losing children". Her first paid job in composing was in 1969, producing for 23 different advertisements. Around this time she worked on sound installations at galleries, exhibitions, and dance performances, composed for films, and worked the night shift at KPFA, a radio station in Berkeley. Ciani also started a furniture company, but ceased after six months after two "unsaleable" designs, theft, fire, and vandalism. She realised that she was not doing what she liked, and returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on music. In 1970, she released her debut record, Voices of Packaged Souls (1970), put together at the station's recording studio. The album had an initial release of 50 copies.