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It’s impossible to have grown up in the U.S. \u2014 or really anywhere in the developed world \u2014 and not heard Suzanne Ciani’s<\/a> electronic music compositions and sound design. Most famously, she’s the creator of the “pop and pour” sound<\/a> used in Coca-Cola commercials throughout the world. She’s also the composer of the <\/span>intro music<\/a> that plays before Columbia Pictures movies. Another fun fact you may be less familiar with: She became the first woman heard in a pinball machine when she leant her vocoder-recorded voice to the game <\/span>Xenon<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>in 1979, as well as composing its minimalist synth soundtrack.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ciani first became fascinated with electronic music while she was getting her master’s degree in composition at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1960s. There, she met Don Buchla, creator of the Buchla synthesizer, and began renting out Buchla and Moog synthesizers at the tape music center at the nearby Mills College, where visitors could use the studio for just $5. “We need more of these facilities,” she says. “Kids are spending so much money now on gear. I understand that addiction to hardware.”<\/p>\n

What she personally finds addictive about electronic music is that it’s “very variable,” she says, explaining that she’s constantly getting sent new instruments to try out. “It’s modular, so you put together your own customized instrument, and right now, there are thousands of modules to choose from, and it’s a bit overwhelming and a bit exciting,” she says. “When you play the piano, you wake up and the piano is there \u2014 it’s like, ‘oh, the piano.’ With electronic music, you wake up and there’s something new you have to investigate. You have to learn it. It’s always changing.”<\/p>\n

“Always changing” appropriately describes Ciani’s career. Since 1970, she’s put out 15 studio albums and six live albums, some devoted to synthesizer and others with piano. The most recent, Improvisation on Four Sequences<\/em>, is a recording of a live Buchla Quadraphonic performance in Geneva, Switzerland from January’s Festival Antigel. In it, you can hear the wide array of synthesizer sounds Ciani is known for, from the high-pitched and energetic to the slow and ominous-sounding.<\/p>\n