Suzanne Ciani 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.
43 Facts About Suzanne Ciani
2.
Suzanne Ciani has been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best New Age Album five times.
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Suzanne Ciani was raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, a southern suburb of Boston.
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Suzanne Ciani's father was a physician, and she started to play the piano at age six.
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From 1964 to 1968, Ciani studied traditional liberal arts at Wellesley College in nearby Wellesley where she received classical music training.
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Suzanne Ciani took evening classes, one of which was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which is where she first learned about music technology.
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Suzanne Ciani studied for a master's degree in composition at University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 to 1970.
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Suzanne Ciani took a summer course in computer music at Stanford University where she was taught by Max Mathews, John Chowning, and Leland Smith at the Artificial Intelligence Lab.
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Suzanne Ciani's first paid job in composing was in 1969, producing for 10 Macy's Christmas advertisements.
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Suzanne Ciani started a furniture company but ceased after six months after two "unsaleable" designs, theft, fire, and vandalism.
11.
Suzanne Ciani realized that she was not doing what she liked and decided to make her living at music.
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Suzanne Ciani became a session musician, but soon struggled to maintain a steady income.
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Suzanne Ciani 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.
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Suzanne Ciani spent three years on the venue's renovation, but "that didn't work".
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At a solo show in April 1975, Suzanne Ciani learned that Vladimir Ussachevsky had attended and recommended her to a grant.
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Suzanne Ciani 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.
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Suzanne Ciani enjoyed the opportunity to work for such companies and enjoyed the creative freedom because few people understood what the Buchla could do as it lacked a keyboard.
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Suzanne Ciani is responsible for "logo" sounds pertaining to Energizer and ABC.
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Suzanne Ciani performed as a guest artist on various albums from 1976.
20.
At the time, Suzanne Ciani thought the work was just a "song about spaceships".
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Suzanne Ciani scored Lloyd Williams's 1975 experimental film Rainbow's Children, and for a 1986 documentary about Mother Teresa.
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Suzanne Ciani composed the 1976 Columbia Pictures and Columbia Pictures Television logo themes.
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In 1979, Suzanne Ciani was commissioned to provide sounds to the pinball machine game Xenon, which featured her own voice fed through a vocoder.
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Suzanne Ciani then sampled her voice onto a sound chip with the aim of selling it for use in other applications, including elevator announcements.
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In 1980, Suzanne Ciani demonstrated several of her sound effects on national television with an appearance on The David Letterman Show.
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Suzanne Ciani scored the soundtrack to Lily Tomlin's film The Incredible Shrinking Woman, which marked the first solo female composer of a Hollywood film.
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In 1982, Suzanne Ciani released her first studio album characterized by electronic and new-age music.
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Suzanne Ciani later said that making albums was something that she had always wanted to do, calling it "my destiny".
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Suzanne Ciani started on her first, Seven Waves, in 1979 which saw an initial Japanese only release.
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Suzanne Ciani reasoned this to the difficulty American record labels had in selling an electronic album by a female artist that lacked vocals.
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In 1985, Suzanne Ciani received a Bronze Lion award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
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In July and August 1987, Suzanne Ciani performed her first live solo concerts in 15 years.
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In 1991, Suzanne Ciani released Hotel Luna, the music for which was inspired by her travels to Italy to learn more about her Italian ancestry.
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In 1992, the soap opera One Life to Live introduced a new theme song written and performed by Suzanne Ciani, who did scoring for several episodes of the show.
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In 1994, Suzanne Ciani founded her own independent record label, Seventh Wave.
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Suzanne Ciani was an inaugural member of the Independent Music Awards' judging panel to support independent artists.
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In February 2015, Suzanne Ciani was one of three Wellesley College alumnae to receive an Alumnae Achievement Award.
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In 2016, Suzanne Ciani released Buchla Concerts 1975, formed of two live performances in New York City in April 1975.
39.
In 2016, Suzanne Ciani released Sunergy, a collaboration using Buchla synthesizers with the musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, as part of the RVNG Intl.
40.
In May 2017, Suzanne Ciani became the first female to receive a Moog Music Innovation Award at the annual electronic festival Moogfest.
41.
In June 2018, Suzanne Ciani released LIVE Quadraphonic, a live album documenting her first solo performance on a Buchla synthesizer in 40 years.
42.
In 1992, Suzanne Ciani was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer from which she recovered after radiation treatments and surgery.
43.
From 1994 to 2000, Suzanne Ciani was married to producer and entertainment attorney Joseph Anderson.