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 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".

Early life Ciani was born in an army hospital in Indiana. Her father was a physician, and she started to play the piano at age 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.

Ciani studied for a master's degree in composition at University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 to 1970. Ciani became a devotee, working for Buchla. "I call Don the Leonardo DaVinci of instrument design." John Chowning, and Leland Smith at the Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Her first paid job in composing was in 1969, producing for 10 Macy's Christmas advertisements. but soon struggled to maintain a steady income. She once accepted a concert performance at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan, but when she was denied a four-speaker quadraphonic sound setup, she refused to perform. She also spent three years on the venue's renovation, but "that didn't work". At a solo show in April 1975, Ciani learned that Vladimir Ussachevsky had attended and recommended her to a grant. She later wrote that she was "homeless and happy" at this time and moved from the loft of art critic Robert Hughes to the floor of Philip Glass's basement recording studio. The sound of a bottle of Coca-Cola being opened and poured was one of Ciani's most widely recognized works and was used in radio and television commercials in the late 1970s. She is also responsible for "logo" sounds pertaining to Energizer and ABC. Such was the demand for her services, that at one point she was doing up to 10 sessions a week.

Ciani performed as a guest artist on various albums from 1976. The first was the same-titled album by the Starland Vocal Band, including the "swoosh" sound to "Afternoon Delight". At the time, Ciani thought the work was just a "song about spaceships".

In 1979, Ciani was commissioned to provide sounds to the pinball machine game Xenon, which featured her own voice fed through a vocoder. This marked the first female voice heard in a pinball game and Ciani had never played pinball before the project arose. In 2013, she was inducted into The Pinball Expo Hall of Fame for her work on the game. Ciani then sampled her voice onto a sound chip with the aim of selling it for use in other applications, including elevator announcements. The US federal government approached her to design sounds for flight simulators.

1980s In 1980, Ciani demonstrated several of her sound effects on national television with an appearance on The David Letterman Show. The producers agreed for her to perform her own music with the show's house band, but they cut to a commercial break when they started to play. That same year, she also appeared on the PBS children's TV show 3-2-1 Contact demonstrating her synthesizer. Ciani's television work in the 1980s included an Atari commercial and work on a proposed "negative vocoder" with Harald Bode, but development ceased following Bode's death in 1987.

In 1982, Ciani released her first studio album characterized by electronic and new-age music. She later said that making albums was something that she had always wanted to do, calling it "my destiny". the Buchla 200, Bode Vocoder, Lyricon, Synclavier, Polymoog, and Arp and Eventide Processing.

In 1985, Ciani received a Bronze Lion award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Ciani's 1986 album The Velocity of Love, released by RCA Records, features the title track which became her best known song. It marks her first piano recordings for many years since focusing her work on the Buchla.

1990s Although emphasizing electronic music in her recordings, her solo piano album Pianissimo, from 1990, became her best-selling album. Ciani ended her contract with Private Music with the compilation The Private Music of Suzanne Ciani, in 1992.

In 1991, Ciani released Hotel Luna, the music for which was inspired by her travels to Italy to learn more about her Italian ancestry.

In 1992, the soap opera One Life to Live introduced a new theme song written and performed by Ciani, who also did scoring for several episodes of the show.

In 1994, Ciani founded her own independent record label, Seventh Wave. Her husband became the label's president. Ciani was also an inaugural member of the Independent Music Awards' judging panel to support independent artists.

Ciani performed in a new-age jazz group, the Wave.

In February 2015, Ciani received an Achievement Award from the Wellesley Alumnae Association, one of three women honored that night.

In 2016, Ciani released Buchla Concerts 1975, formed of two live performances in New York City in April 1975.

In May 2017, Ciani became the first woman to receive a Moog Music Innovation Award at the annual electronic festival Moogfest.

In June 2018, Ciani released Live Quadraphonic, a live album documenting her first solo performance on a Buchla synthesizer in 40 years. The show took place at Gray Area in San Francisco on March 5, 2016, presented in four channel quadraphonic sound. A recording of this performance was one of the first quadraphonic LP vinyl releases in over 30 years and used an encoding process based on the QS Regular Matrix system. Inspired by the Buchla 227 quad output module, the $227 release was a very limited edition of only 227 numbered, 45 rpm, 180g quadraphonic vinyl discs sold. The box also included an enamel pin based on the album cover, plus a custom quadraphonic hardware decoder made in collaboration with Involve Audio to decode two channels of audio from the vinyl disc back to the four-channel recording.

In June 2019, Finders Keepers Records released an unrealized album project by Ciani that she recorded in 1969 titled Flowers of Evil. It features a recital of Élévation by French poet Charles Baudelaire, with Ciani performing on a Buchla synthesizer.

In 2023, Ciani released Improvisation on Four Sequences, a live recording of her Buchla performance at the 2022 Rewire Festival in The Hague. The album features spontaneous modular synthesis across four channels and was praised for its “radiant clarity and interdimensional drift,” reaffirming Ciani’s central role in the evolution of spatial electronic music.

In 2024, Ciani collaborated with immersive event series Age of Reflections to present her Particles & Waves Tour. For the first time since its 1984 release, Ciani performed her Seven Waves album, paired with Reflections’ projection-mapped visuals in a tour of cathedrals.

Personal life In 1992, Ciani was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer from which she recovered after radiation treatments and surgery. The news prompted her relocation from New York City to California and she has resided in the coastal community of Bolinas since.

From 1994 to 2000, Ciani was married to producer and entertainment attorney Joseph Anderson. The marriage ended in divorce.

Awards and honors EMEAPP Lifetime Achievement Award, 2024 Milley Award for Musical Arts, 2023 SEAMUS Award, 2023 Herb Alpert Visiting Professorship, 2022-2023 Golden Ear Award, 2022 A2IM Independent Icon Award, 2020 Moog Innovation Award, 2017 Pinball Expo Hall of Fame, 2013 Keyboard Magazine's Hall of Fame, 2012 Nominee, Grammy Award for Best New Age Album: Neverland (1988), Hotel Luna (1991), Dream Suite (1996), Pianissimo II (1997), Turning (2000) Best New Age Keyboardist, Keyboard magazine, 1992 Lifetime Achievement Award (Granny), Women in Audio Section of the Audio and Engineering Society, 1997 Winner, American Federation of Independent Music (Indie), Silver Ship, 2006 Most Valuable Synthesizer Player Award, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, 1987 Clio Awards, Excellence in Advertising, 1977–1989 Bronze Lion Award for Excellence in Advertising, International Advertising Film Festival, 1985

Discography Solo

Studio albums Voices of Packaged Souls (1970) Seven Waves (1982) The Velocity of Love (1986) Neverland (1988) History of My Heart (1989) Pianissimo (1990) Hotel Luna (1991) Dream Suite (1994) Pianissimo II (1996) Turning (1999) Pianissimo III (2001) Silver Ship (2005) Logo Presentation Reels 1985 (2012) "Help, Help, The Globolinks!" (2017) Flowers of Evil (2019) Denali (2020) Golden Apples of the Sun (with Jonathan Fitoussi) (2023)

Live albums Suzanne Ciani and The Wave Live! (1997) Logo Presentation Reels 1985 (2012) Buchla Concerts 1975 (2016) LIVE Quadraphonic (2018) Live Buchla at Machines in Music (2018) A Sonic Womb: Live Buchla performance at Lapsus (2020) Improvisation on Four Sequences at Festival Antigel (2021) Improvisation on Four Sequences Live at Week-End Fest (2023) Buchla Concert At Galeria Bonino New York April 1974 (2024) Live At Villa Lontana (2025) Concrète Waves (with Actress) (2026) CIANI/ORKEST (with Metropole Orkest & Simon Dobson) (2026)

Compilations The Private Music of Suzanne Ciani (1992) Meditations for Dreams, Relaxation, and Sleep (2002) Pure Romance (2003) Lixiviation (Ciani/Musica Inc. 1969–1985) (2012) A Life in Waves (2020)

Appearances

DVD 1997 Suzanne Ciani and The Wave Live! 2008 Natura Poetica 2008 Galapagos: A Musical Odyssey 2020 "A Life in Waves" Blu-Ray

Publications 1991 Suzanne Ciani: New Age Piano (Hal Leonard) 1995 Suzanne Ciani: Dream Songs (Hal Leonard) 1999 Suzanne Ciani: Turning (Hal Leonard) 2007 The Best of Suzanne Ciani (Hal Leonard)

Film scores 1981 The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Universal Pictures) 1986 Mother Teresa, (Petrie Productions) 1986 Cradle of wolves (Mexican novel - Televisa Productions) 2001 Mother Teresa: The Legacy (Petrie Productions) 2026 The History of Concrete: (Central Pictures)