20 Questions With Electronic Pioneer Suzanne Ciani: ‘Now I Have An Audience. The Kids Know What’s Going On’
Categoria: Musica
The 80-year-old electronic visionary performs her first show in Scotland this weekend before a festival set in Roswell, New Mexico next month.
Por Billboard | 02/10/2026
Suzanne Ciani was not only present at the beginning of electronic music, but helped develop the technology that would become the basis of an entire global genre. Born in Ohio, Ciani earned a master’s degree in composition at UC Berkeley, where she met synthesizer designer Don Buchla and became one of the first people to master the Buchla modular analog synthesizer. In 1974, she founded Ciani/Musica, where she developed sounds for brands including AT&T, General Electric and Coca-Cola. (The soda’s “ pop & pour ” sound logo was her creation, as was the Columbia Pictures intro score .) She’s released more than 25 studio and live albums and received five Grammy nominations, all in the new age category. Now 80 years old, she’s experienced a late career renaissance on the power of her live modular synthesizer performances, work that’s brought her into the fray of the dance/electronic festival circuit and earned her friends like Floating Points and collaborator Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. This weekend, Ciani performs her first ever concert in Scotland, at Glasgow’s Sonica Festival, a longstanding art and experimental music festival where Ciani will perform among a lineup of other experimental artists from around the world. In early November, she’ll be back home in the States to play Atomika, a new science and music festival happening in the remote desert outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Ahead of these performances, Ciani spoke to Billboard over Zoom from her home in Northern California about her life in technology. 1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like? I’m home for a change, because I spend a lot of time traveling. And home right now is temporary, because I am in the process of selling my house after 34 years — a house I never thought I would leave because it was so exquisitely beautiful. But I just wanted a new chapter. I wrote many albums there. I had a beautiful life there, and now I’m ready for something else. It’s healthy. It’s stimulating. The basis of technology is change. It’s built in. 2. What is the first album or piece of music that you bought for yourself, and what was the medium? Actually my mother bought it, and it was a Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto and a Grieg Piano Concerto. It was romantic classical music. My mother had gone to a fire sale and come home with this stack of LPs, and I would just sit and listen to them morning, noon and night, swooning at the emotion of the music. 3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid ? My dad was an orthopedic surgeon. My mom was a mom. She had six kids and was the consummate homemaker. She could sew anything. She could build anything. She had tools in her jewelry box. 4. What did they think of what you do for a living? My dad was Italian. He had five daughters and one son, and his idea about women was that they were supposed to get married, have children and tak