Suzanne Ciani is a five-time Grammy award-nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist who has released over twenty solo albums including Seven Waves, and The Velocity of Love, along with a landmark quad LP LIVE Quadraphonic, which restarted her Buchla modular performances. Her work has been featured in films, games, and countless commercials as well.

She was inducted into the first class of Keyboard Magazine’s Hall of Fame alongside other synth luminaries, including Bob Moog, Don Buchla, and Dave Smith and received the Moog Innovation Award. Most recently, she is the recipient of the Independent Icon Award from A2IM.

Suzanne has provided the voice and sounds for Bally’s groundbreaking “Xenon” pinball machine, created Coca-Cola’s pop-and-pour sound, designed logos for Fortune 500 companies, and carved out a niche as one of the most creatively successful female composers in the world. A Life in Waves, a documentary about Ciani’s life and work, debuted at SXSW in 2017 and is available to watch on all digital platforms.

Ciani is a graduate of Wellesley College and holds a Masters in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley.

On a personal note — I was first introduced to Suzanne’s work at a record store in Los Angeles where they were celebrating the re-release of her Buchla Concerts 1975 album. The album is a live performance on the Buchla synthesizer, and I was fascinated by the sounds she was able to produce. Since then, Suzanne has been a huge influence on my work and the way I think about noise and sound. It was an honor to speak with her about noise, and the way she thinks about life.

I embraced his vision of a new musical instrument. It was the 200 series Buchla synthesizer then. This instrument was a complete 180-degree turn from my classical training. What he taught me was freedom. He had an attitude until the end of working with his instrument as a collaborative artistic expression. As an artist, I’m working within the frame of what he’s given me as a tool. And that tool is a very open architecture. There’s nothing defined. It gives you so many choices to create and express yourself. You choose the modules, you choose the patch, and you select the raw materials that you’re going to use. But all of this choosing is an expression of freedom in designing what it is that you’re going to do.

Don had a certain attitude towards the world. For instance, I would ask him, “Don, this module will not tune properly; it’s driving me crazy because I can’t calibrate it into my tuning system.” And he’d look at me and say, “We’ll do something else. Don’t try to force your will on something that doesn’t want to do what you want to do.”

Theoretically, digital can do anything analog does because it’s just a matter of computational power and direction. We all say that you can replicate anything if you have enough data, and digital is data. But in general, I don’t think that data alone is a measure of musical functionality, so it’s not interesting to me that you might be able to do it.

It’s like the difference between analog and digital recording technology. During the transition from analog tape to digital recording, I was doing an album and had two multi-track machines, one analog and one digital. There was a 32-track Mitsubishi digital machine02 and a 24-track analog tape recorder. As an experiment, I would record each sound on both machines and then make a subjective, empirical decision based on just my ears. In general, the high-frequency sounds sounded better on the analog machine.

I’m not trying to say that one is better than the other; it’s just a different universe. The analog is softer because it’s a little bit blurrier; it doesn’t have the edges that the digital one has. The digital machines have these edges because they do everything in increments, and even if those become infinitesimally small, they’re still increments and samples. So, I prefer analog.

There are different levels of perfection. I tend to be a perfectionist in my studio album work because you’re in a situation you can control to the nth degree. If you get carried away with that control, though, you focus on minutia and aren’t focused as much on the big picture. The issue with perfectionism is that it replaces an appreciation for the whole, the communication of the whole, with a microcosmic focus that, in the end, might not be that significant for communication. We go down those perfectionistic tunnels as almost a distraction from serving the communication.

What I love about live performances on the Buchla is that they are always different. That’s what I mean when I say it’s alive. It’s a life form of its own. That’s why we like it—it’s constantly changing and not frozen. It’s not a digital sample, which might be perfect—for example, a perfect sample of a perfect cello note. But those samples are dead. To be alive, it has to be in motion.

I see life as a continuum. An individual has a specific span, and I will die, predictably, within the next twenty years at most. Life continues but is not housed in my existence. Right now, I’m very concerned with the connections to the new generation, which will carry on expressing and continuing the evolutionary process of the work that I’m involved in.

As soon as I feel content that I’ve communicated what I have to say and that it’s been heard, I’m happy. I don’t pretend to know where it will go, but I know I’m a certain link in the chain. So, I want that link to be connected to the chain properly before I go.

I don’t think you can separate it. Confronting one’s mortality is a shock. It’s shocking because if we lived our lives in constant awareness of our mortality, we’d be crazy. But it’s a good thing to put into one’s history.

When I created the album, love was about a safe place. It wasn’t romantic love. It wasn’t a person-to-person kind of love. I like to think of love as a universal energy system or force. You don’t know what it is, but know when you’re in it. You know when you feel it. I like that album because it elicits whatever happens when we feel love. After all, love is connection. We often consider it a person-to-person connection, but it could be as expansive as the universe.

Until I returned to the Buchla synthesizer seven or eight years ago, my career was rooted in classical music. Even though my first album, Seven Waves (1982), was all electronic, it was based on melody. And it was based on romance—not in the sense of a relationship, romance, but in romantic music. Romantic music was rooted in the idea that feeling was the focus. The idea was to elicit human emotion.

What I’m doing now is more abstract. I’m in a chapter of my creative life which could be related to the visual artist who starts out doing representative work and then goes abstract. I’m in my abstract period. But my abstract period still references my classical roots. It’s just a new language. I create spaces, whether it’s an emotional space or an actual immersive sonic space, which I’m doing now because I’m focused on quadraphonic, spatial movement, and the three-dimensionality of the experience of listening. Creating these spaces is fundamental and essential to me.

It’s a dangerous precipice because there are different levels of romanticism. For instance, there are cheap romance novels, romantic bodices, etc. There can be less inspiring levels of what we call romanticism. But for me, romanticism is the glue of the universe. It’s the idea that you can see a connection in nature, that your surroundings speak to you and include you, that you’re a part of it, and that you’re connected to all you know.

It’s funny because many things I thought would happen in the future haven’t happened until now. So, for me, this is almost a renaissance or a rebirth. What we’re doing is we are going backward. It’s so beautiful because there was a moment in history when we were about to go to a particular place, but we didn’t get there. We saw the future. But the future didn’t happen. Forty years later, it’s happening. It wasn’t a continuum. It wasn’t like we got on a trajectory, and we worked our way up to this point. No. It got lost. Then we came back and reinvestigated. So, it’s not a continuum; it is the finishing of something that was started and will continue.

But that break happened because of technology. It happened because we got distracted by the pure technology of it, making it faster, better, and cheaper; it was all about the tools. It was not about realizing the real potential of the tools. We were just so focused on our appetites. We went from LPs to CDs to DVDs, and eventually, we became engulfed in the commercialization of technology, which became exhausting. The kids got tired and just had to say, “No, wait a minute, stop!” The rapid push towards technological innovation is why we now see a transition back to LPs and modular synthesizers. People are now interested in the interface. They are interested in how you connect to it. You can create those interfaces in many ways. For some reason, this didn’t happen until we went backward. Kids today want to turn a knob; they don’t want to look at a menu. You don’t want to choose from a list of 4,000 string sounds. It becomes exhausting. What I’m interested in working with now is the immediate satisfaction of interacting with the machine; there’s a deep joy in that.

We are fascinated by the possibility of something being created without a human being generating it. You can go pretty far with that. But to have the prompts or the raw materials to foster that creation, you’re taking it from preexisting sources of creation. You’re just doing a new mix.

Most of the world’s artistic content is recognized in the Pyramidal structure of hierarchy. In our human creative lives, we’ve consistently recognized communication levels and organized these through hierarchical structures, whether that’s Michelangelo, Leonardo Di Vinci, etc.… Now, it doesn’t mean as much because there is business attached to the value of a piece of work, even if it doesn’t have cultural or emotional meaning.

Most of the world’s artistic content is recognized in the Pyramidal structure of hierarchy. In our human creative lives, we’ve consistently recognized communication levels and organized these through hierarchical structures, whether that’s Michelangelo, Leonardo Di Vinci, etc.… Now, it doesn’t mean as much because there is business attached to the value of a piece of work, even if it doesn’t have cultural or emotional meaning.

But there have always been exceptional creators. To appreciate any artistic expression, you must be able to see or hear it and take it in; this can be lost on us if we don’t have the receptors to understand it. It’s so subjective. I can play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and you could pass it by as if it were a news program if you aren’t paying attention if you can’t receive it. So there’s the generation and the receiver. All of that is non-literal. If I play a concert and there are 1,000 people in the room, there are a thousand different concerts. I do think that the ability to communicate on a rarified or exceptional level is a very complex dynamic.

However, the problem with artificially generated art is that it has no soul. And I know that sounds like a total dismissal, and I’m not trying to say that it doesn’t have a wonderful place in our lives. But I think that you still need the human. I’m still a romantic about that one.

There’s all the standard stuff, “follow your vision,” “don’t give up.” Oh, gosh! It all sounds so trite. But what I’ve always functioned from is realizing that the seed of your expression is within yourself. So you must be able to access communication within yourself, and if you can communicate with yourself, you access a universal connection. Because at our deepest, uncompromised, most open, vulnerable levels with ourselves, we tap into the infinite. Do what speaks to you. Don’t reference it outside for judgment. It isn’t very meaningful if somebody else likes it. You should ask yourself if you have satisfied your goal. Is that what you wanted to say without excuse? Do non-apologetic work. Your self-satisfaction is the ultimate judgment.