Сузанна Сиани: Американың синтезатор сахнасының жұлдызы

American musician, sound designer, composer

Suzanne Ciani (/ch//i://'//ɑː//n//i:/; 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".

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.

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.

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 was one of three Wellesley College alumnae to receive an Alumnae Achievement Award. 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 female 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 a previously unreleased album by Ciani that she recorded in 1969 entitled Flowers of Evil. It features a recital of Élévation by French poet Charles Baudelaire with Ciani performing on a Buchla synthesizer.

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.