Suzanne Ciani (b. 1946) is an Italian American pioneer in electronic music and one of the few women to blaze a trail in the genre. She received classical music training at Wellesley College and obtained her M.A. in music in 1970 at University of California, Berkeley where she met and was influenced by the idiosyncratic synthesizer designer Don Buchla. In 1974 she formed her own company, Ciani/Musica, and, using a Buchla Analog Modular Synthesizer, began scoring television commercials for Coca-Cola, Merrill Lynch, AT&T and General Electric. Besides music, her specialty was reproducing sound effects on the synthesizer that recording engineers had found difficult to record properly; the sound of a bottle of Coke being opened and poured was one of Ciani's most widely recognized works, and was used in a series of radio and television commercials in the late 1970s. Such was the demand for her services that at one point she was doing up to fifty sessions a week. H

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