Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani (b. 1946) studied composition at Wellesley College and, during a master’s degree at UC Berkeley (1968–1970), met Don Buchla and became one of the earliest and most enduring performers on his modular instruments. She worked at Buchla & Associates, soldering components to earn money toward her own Buchla 200 system, then moved to New York in 1974 and built a career threading avant-garde electronic composition through commercial sound design: she designed audio logos for Fortune 500 companies, most famously Coca-Cola’s “pop and pour” sound, and in 1980 created the voice and electronic effects — processed through a vocoder — for Bally’s Xenon pinball machine, the first human female voice in a pinball game. Her 1982 debut album Seven Waves and five subsequent Grammy-nominated albums (1988–2000) established her as a major voice in electronic and new-age composition. She founded her own label, Seventh Wave, in 1994, and has continued performing live on Buchla systems into the 2010s and 2020s, including 2016’s Buchla Concerts 1975 and 2018’s Live Quadraphonic, her first solo Buchla performance in forty years.