Original subtitles

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

Ladies and gentlemen, this woman standing next to me is, uh...

-(ELECTRONIC FEEDBACK RINGING) -(LAUGHS)

...an electronic wizard. (LAUGHS)

She composed many of the soundtracks you hear on commercials,

she's reproduced the electrical musical effects

for the disco version of Star Wars,

and she's won award after award.

-(ECHOING STOPS) This is Suzanne Ciani, and, uh... -(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

Hello.

First of all, why do you have this stuff? What do you do with this?

Uh, well, this is how I make a living.

-(STAMMERS) But I mean... -(LAUGHTER)

You don't go door to door saying,

-"I'll make you sound goofy." -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

-No, they call me. -They call you.

SUZANNE: This is like the sound that I would make.

(CHIMES ECHOING)

-This is, uh... -It's very nice.

-Is that pretty? -Yes.

SUZANNE: That's "Lights". DAVID LETTERMAN: Do the one

where it sounds like the whole studio is gonna explode.

-Here we go. Ready? -LETTERMAN: Yeah.

(AIR SIREN WAILING)

Oh, yeah. (LAUGHS)

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)

(SOUND GROWING IN VOLUME)

(ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING)

SUZANNE: I've always wondered why my path

has always been a little bit different.

If somebody else can do it, they should do it.

I want to do what only I can do.

NARRATOR: What do the Coca-Cola pop and pour sound effect...

-(BOTTLE CAP POPS) -(DRINK POURING)

...and the Atari video games audio logo have in common?

They were both created by Suzanne Ciani, a pioneer in electronic music.

RUTH CIANI: I used to tell people,

"You don't know her, you don't know her name,

"but you've heard her music."

WOMAN 1: I want to introduce you to a five-time Grammy-nominee composer.

She's a woman whose music has touched the lives

of tens of thousands of people around the world.

ROBERT LOWE: She's a pioneer.

The fact that she took an instrument that was really built

for future sound or future music, and applied that

in the most popular context that you could think of. Advertising.

Was an amazing and subversive thing.

The future is now and the future is right now.

She came up with sounds that were just completely different.

(VOICE DISTORTED) Welcome to Xenon.

Suzanne imagination went like pinball. Pinball game.

Like a... (IMITATING PINBALL SOUNDS)

SUZANNE: Pinball machines, soap operas, orchestral scores.

I always love taking on something new.

Being a woman in this business is very, very tough.

It made her stand out.

SARAH DAVACHI: She was, on the one hand,

an artist who didn't really sell out or compromise

but on the other hand, she was this super successful businesswoman

who made her art work.

MONA-MATHUS: She gave everything to a project.

I mean, and she explored all different possibilities.

She's a woman who was unafraid of pleasure, unafraid of her own

sensuality, and unafraid to show it in her music.

HUNTER MURTAUGH: She's always had this inexhaustible musical talent.

Once you're on that path to make music,

you don't stop, and she never has.

SUZANNE: I was always told that I was different.

"Okay, you're different."

Okay, well, maybe you take that to heart, that you're different,

and maybe you become different.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC PLAYING)

(ELECTRONIC FEEDBACK LAYERS OVER PIANO)

(MUSIC FADES OUT)

Maybe we we're supposed to go right down there.

Excuse me, do you know where Alumnae Hall is?

Yeah, that's probably closed off.

You would have to go down this and around.

-Okay. Okay, thanks. -It's around the campus center.

All right. Great. Thanks. Oh, good. We wanna see the campus center anyway.

I got a letter from Wellesley.

"We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected..."

Blah, blah, blah.

First of all, I've never heard of the Alumnae Achievement Awards.

I haven't had much contact with Wellesley for...

Forty years,

and I didn't know what to say.

I thought, (LAUGHS) "Why are they giving me this award?"

Like, "Who am I?"

And I thought, "Oh, you know, is it the electronic thing?

"Is it composition? Is it..."

You know, it's not like I'm a pop star.

You know, there are people who've been given the award who are, um,

organic gardeners or poets or... You know, some of them are brain surgeons,

and some of them are biologists and...

But in all different fields because Wellesley really is

a, uh, broad-based academic environment.

It's not about, you know, just...

Ooh, I smell something. (SNIFFS)

Uh, you know... (LAUGHS) Do you smell something?

Uh, look how pretty that is.

(SNIFFING) I smell...

I smell grass. (LAUGHS) I smell...

Sorry.

Uh, so this is Lake Waban right here.

I just love...

It's so simple and pristine and magical all at once.

It's just amazing.

MURTAUGH: Suzanne's life has always been about art and beauty.

You get the voice, you get the person,

you get the sounds, you get the knowledge, you get the computers.

It's all wrapped up in Suzanne.

PROFESSOR: I am beyond thrilled to welcome Suzanne Ciani to our class.

Let's give her a nice, warm welcome.

(APPLAUSE)

This is thrilling because, you know... Uh, really.

I mean, there's just not enough women in this area.

ALFRED MERRIN: She was always ebullient, always effervescent,

and always excited about what she was doing.

Always excited about what she was doing.

And which nobody really understood.

SUZANNE: So, this is for the Wellesley newspaper?

STUDENT: Yeah. SUZANNE: Yeah.

STUDENT: Do you have any words of wisdom for the students of Wellesley?

I perceive that there's a lot of

emphasis on fame and fortune.

It's like... It seems like people wanna be famous.

-Yeah. (LAUGHS) -You know?

Or they wanna be rich.

And I do say that both of those are not real goals.

There's somebody without any pants on.

I mean, her legs are bare.

Suzanne has an astonishingly original approach,

because she kind of trusts to fate

and trusts to the world that it's all gonna come out right.

SUZANNE: So, here is, uh, Louise Dolan.

She was a superstring theorist.

An astronaut. That's pretty cool.

Hillary Clinton. She got it in 2003.

A trail blazer, a scholar, educator,

a humanist.

Isn't this wonderful to see what all these women have accomplished?

I guess I'm old enough to get some recognition, you know? (LAUGHS)

-(CAMERA CLICKING) -But it's not a comfortable place to be,

because it's, it's kind of acknowledging

that you're at your endgame, you know? (LAUGHS)

And you start to look at the span of your life,

and you see all the different chapters.

(FILM REEL ROLLING)

SUZANNE: Well, I grew up in a big family.

My father clearly was waiting for a boy and I was the third girl.

So, when I was brought up, I... You know, I learned to play baseball.

I was a pitcher on the boy's baseball team.

She was pretty much a star in the classroom,

and she was a star on the athletic field

or on the basketball court.

RUTH: She was just gorgeous. She was brilliant and she was gorgeous.

There were lots of boys hanging around the house.

Mom said, "Oh, my gosh, Ruthie, they, they're coming out of the bushes."

SUZANNE: There were boys every place. (LAUGHS) There were boys...

But we don't have to go... How far did they go into that?

(LAUGHING) I don't know. It's like...

-(FILM REEL ROLLING) -My dad was an orthopedic surgeon,

and my mom was a housewife.

My dad ran the house like the king.

A woman needs to know how to shave a man and polish his shoes.

That's what he always said.

He wanted to be a musician, and when he went to Harvard,

he immediately signed up for music classes,

and they were just all crossed off,

because he was pre-med,

and they said, "No, you can't study music,"

and it always broke his heart.

So, this is my childhood piano.

It's a Steinway that my mom bought,

uh, and brought it into the house

and so, I grew up with this piano.

CYNTHIA CIANI: Suzanne tells this story that mom came home from a garage sale

with some albums of classical music,

and that inspired her to want to learn music.

SUZANNE: My mom has always been pivotal. She found the piano.

She found the classical records that changed my life.

And I took those things for granted,

but I really have her to thank.

(PIANO PLAYING)

SUZANNE: I played constantly.

I loved the piano,

and I could play the same Chopin piece

over and over and over and just get lost in it.

JUDITH CIANI: She played the piano hours every night

and it was when she was in high school

that she, on her own,

decided to go to Longy School of Music.

SUZANNE: I was so grateful for the independence that I had with music.

The fact that I was a woman gave me the freedom to pursue music,

because nothing more was expected of me.

If I had been a son, I would've been directed

into a profession like medicine or law,

and, as it was, I had freedom.

Here I am... How many years later?

I'm sure it's just completely different now.

I don't know what it's like now, you know?

Do you still have bells where they announce when your date comes?

No.

They just come in?

-Yeah, people just go in and out, pretty much. -(GASPS)

We had this thing, you know, where the receptionist

would announce, you know, the man...

-"You have a male, a male visitor." -(BOTH LAUGHING)

You know, it's like, okay, everybody... (LAUGHS)

-Oh, my God. -Be prepared, there's a male.

I had a boyfriend.

He was at Harvard Law School.

You know, he did propose.

You know, all the girls were getting married senior year,

and my mother loved him, and, you know,

she would've been happy if I had married,

but I just wasn't ready.

(WOMEN SINGING CHORAL MUSIC)

The truth is, I really didn't want to narrow my life down right away.

I mean, maybe, I would've been perfectly happy,

but it would have been a completely different life.

(CHORAL SINGING CONTINUES)

(ALL APPLAUDING)

EMCEE: It is now my great pleasure to introduce to you

the recipients of the 2015 Alumnae Achievement Award.

Suzanne Ciani.

(ALL APPLAUDING)

I first heard of the concept of electronic music while still a student here.

My senior year, we became

the sister school of MIT,

and a professor there had taken the budget

that was intended for something else

and was trying to make a musical tone

in this, you know, big university computer.

It was quite an amazing thing when I heard this little sound emitted.

And that planted, in my mind, a concept

that would draw me forward, continuously, from that moment on.

That's the tower. That's where, you know,

all the, uh, students would meet to do protests.

It was at the base of that tower.

Berkeley, when I went there,

I was, you know, the girl from Wellesley college,

and that blew up in minutes.

(PROTESTORS CLAMORING)

You know, it was the late'60s.

It was 1968 when I got there,

and it was the beginning of all these uprisings and upheavals,

and it was a very political time,

and so I got politicized like right away.

I was playing Chopin in the music room,

and a rock came through the window.

And I was like, "Uh-oh. I guess it's not the way I thought it was gonna be.

"There's no time for Chopin right now."

This is the architecture department,

and that's the bench where I had met Joseph.

The music department was right next to the architecture department,

and so I saw a sculptor sitting out in front of the architecture department.

He was polishing a sculpture,

and I went down and sat beside him and found out where he lived,

(LAUGHS) and we moved in together.

We lived in a model of the future home that he believed in.

So, he built this thing out of foam.

And it was like a womb.

We lived in this red womb

in the front of which had a sculpture

that went off into infinity.

So, the idea was that you could live in a small space

but visually feel, you know, huge dimension.

It was a very exciting time. It was a hippie time.

It was a drug time.

It was exactly the right place to be.

The first electronic music center with public access

was the San Francisco Tape Music Center

which was housed right nearby the campus at Mills College,

and I could go there and stay there all night.

When I came to Berkeley, I came as a composer,

but once I got involved in electronic music,

I saw it as a compositional tool,

and I was very excited, you know, to introduce that into my graduate work.

(PERCUSSION PLAYING)

This was the theater that I brought my music class to

to hear my electronic composition,

and we came here and there were speakers and a sound system.

When I brought over

my first electronic composition to the class,

I was catapulted into,

you know, nirvana, hearing the sound

in the big theater with the speakers.

I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever heard.

And when it was over, I looked over at my professor,

thinking that I would get a smile, an accolade,

some, you know, recognition,

and he looked at me and he said,

"Tell me, why did you bring us over here?"

Okay, why did I bring you over here?

It's like, "What was that

"useless piece of nothing

"that you made us listen to?"

And so,

I knew that those two worlds weren't gonna... They weren't gonna match.

(ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING)

SUZANNE: I decided that I would just finish my degree

but put my heart into my own work outside of school,

and I just happened to find myself in the place

where one of the original designers of synthesizers was working.

Don Buchla.

Don Buchla was the inventor of the modular synthesizer.

He made the first modular synthesizer in 1963.

Don was so important because of the fact that he built an instrument

that did not necessarily consider instruments that had come before

or traditions that had come before.

He didn't need a black and white keyboard to make music.

DAVACHI: I think Don inspired Suzanne in probably a pretty similar way

that he inspired everybody else who was around him,

but especially her,

because she just had all this enthusiasm and wanted to learn

and was just, like, super keen to get into it,

and I think maybe that might have caught him off-guard.

SUZANNE: My memory is going to Don Buchla's big warehouse

and being led into this massive, dark space,

and in the center was a tower of modules,

all flashing lights.

And I thought, "Oh, this is where I belong."

And so, I did get the opportunity to work there.

I can't remember exactly how I got the job,

but I can tell you that I lost it the next day.

They found a cold soldering joint.

He just assumed that it was the new girl.

Now, I may not have been the world's best solderer,

but I knew that I didn't do that cold soldering joint.

I thought it was unjust that he just assumed without proof.

The fact that I wasn't regarded as an equal

made me put a lot more energy into it.

That's what women did then.

They were better.

If a guy could do something, the woman would do it better,

and that's how they earned their way

into visibility.

And so I said, "You can't fire me."

And I just showed up the next day.

I started out working for Don Buchla

in his factory, and I could...

You know, I was right there on location,

and I said, "Gee, I think we should have a knob here,"

and you'd have a knob there.

It was all developed kind of organically.

He became my mentor.

He analyzed the very essence of,

you know, the human being and the expression of music, physically.

You know, what does it mean to interact with a thing,

an instrument, and create music.

INTERVIEWER: I'm in a recording studio with Suzanne Ciani,

a master musician of an unusual instrument.

SUZANNE: A synthesizer is an electronic musical instrument.

It works by using electronic signals to produce sound,

and the sound could be, for instance, uh, like normal instruments,

like, oh, a cello, or a guitar sound, or a horn sound, or a flute,

or unusual sounds, the sounds of snowstorms, of birds,

or just make-believe sounds.

-Can you show me some of them? -Sure.

I have the sound in here.

You have to tell me what it is. Okay? You guess.

(ELECTRONIC TRICKLING)

Like rain drops?

Like water dropping.

It's like things plopping into water.

SUZANNE: Electronic music was a wide-open space

with sounds that nobody had ever heard before.

Buchla's instruments,

the sound was secondary, believe it or not.

I could make a sound that went in a second

from a bass sound all the way up to off the edge of hearing.

What instrument is that? What sound is that?

It's not a sound.

It's a movement.

INTERVIEWER: What are they?

Oh, these are patch cords. This is...

These are the things that route the signal

from one little module to another to get the sound.

You can patch it in a lot of different ways.

And the way you patch it will determine what you get.

It's like creating an instrument.

LOWE: Modular synthesizers like the Buchla

are like living beings in a lot of ways.

The dialogue begins with

the patching of cables from one module to another,

and they begin to have a conversation.

And then you sort of manipulate and control that conversation.

When you spend so much time with these machines,

you start to develop a bit of an emotional connection to them.

They're kind of, like, these beings that you interact with.

Generating sound is a very personal, primal thing.

So if you really dive into this micro space

and spend a lot of time with the machine, the, the...

The being, whatever it is,

to create those sounds, they express your emotions.

So, of course, you can develop emotions

for the creature that allows you to produce it and to express yourself.

(THEREMIN PLAYING )

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

(DRUMS PLAYING )

(SAXOPHONE PLAYING )

(DRUMS PLAYING )

(METRONOMES TICKING)

All, uh...

-This entire area, all modulars. -SUZANNE: Oh, look at this.

Wow.

-(ELECTRONIC BEAT PLAYING) -This is a very nice interface.

-Oh, did I hit something? -You probably hit something.

(LAUGHING)

SUZANNE: You know, there are so many expressions now

of electronic instruments all over the world, right?

Somebody is making a little module here and there.

But Don, in my opinion,

is the one who has taken it to the highest level

of dedication and concept.

Today, I was lazy. I did do a little tour of the modular synths

up in the corner. And, Don, your designs

are so beyond...

Oh, that's nice of you.

SUZANNE: My first love affair was with the piano,

and my second love affair was with the Buchla.

And, you know, for a good 12 years,

the Buchla was on all the time.

So it never got shut off.

It lived with me.

It was compact. I could cart it around to my sessions.

My mission

was to introduce these new instruments

as performable instruments

in the same historical vein as other instruments.

And I took that very seriously,

especially when I moved to New York.

Cab karma.

I didn't decide, really, to move to New York.

I went to New York to do a live Buchla concert.

And once I got there,

I realized I didn't wanna leave.

I did see myself, from the time I came to New York,

as a performer and as a recording artist.

I went to every single record label.

I would say, "I play the synthesizer,"

and they'd say, "You what?"

You know? "You don't sing? You don't play guitar?"

MURTAUGH: You didn't know anything that she was doing.

You didn't understand it. I don't know from wires, or Buchla's

or potentiometers, or rheostats, or...

Whatever makes the sounds come out, but she does.

She'd make music the way people used to do telephone calls

-with all these wires going... There wasn't any keyboard. -RUTH: Right. Wires.

MARY CIANI: It was the weirdest thing in the world.

SUZANNE: There was just such a huge, huge chasm

between the music business

and my life as an artist.

I had done scores.

You know, I did X-rated films

when I was trying to, you know, get started and make money.

I did the electronic part of the score for The Stepford Wives.

Hi, Kit. How are you?

Hello, Mary Ann.

SUZANNE: The Stepford Wives were women who were really robotic,

but it wasn't apparent right away.

Hello, Carol.

Hi, Pat.

SUZANNE: And so the electronics became,

you know, part of that signal

of something in the machinery going awry.

No, you look.

Joanna...

(EERIE SYNTHESIZER PLAYING)

(SIGHS) How could you do a thing like that?

SUZANNE: I did things with a lot of slow frequency modulation

that just made you feel

scared and, uh, upset.

(GLASS SHATTERS)

I thought we were friends.

I thought we were friends.

SUZANNE: I think the electronics were a metaphor

for the operating system of these women,

you know, it was technology,

and this was the sound of their inner workings kind of coming apart.

And it was scary.

I thought we were friends.

I was surrounded by visual artists.

And I saw that if you're a visual artist,

you had something to sell.

So I called all the top advertising agencies in New York,

and, a couple of times,

I got a meeting scheduled with Billy Davis,

who was the head of music at McCann-Erickson,

and I think that was the largest agency in New York.

I would show up at the meeting and Billy wasn't there.

And I remember going up to the agency,

I said, "Where is Billy Davis?"

They pointed to a control room door,

and I went right into the control room,

and I said, "You had an appointment with me."

And at that very moment,

this is just the strangest story,

they were playing a Coca-Cola jingle.

(COCA-COLA JINGLE PLAYING)

And there was a little blank space in it.

(SILENCE)

(JINGLE CONTINUES)

And he said, "Can you do something in there?"

And I said, "Yes."

(BOTTLE CAP POPS)

(DRINK POURING)

(COKE ADDS LIFE JINGLE PLAYING)

(DRINK POURING)

SUZANNE: I brought this big Buchla,

and it was in five road cases, and I'd have to assemble it.

And I set this thing up and it had all the wires and patches,

and out came this wonderful sound that worked for them.

And they used it all over the world.

They didn't care that I was tuning the sub audio harmonics

of a sawtooth waveform melodically.

Coke was like hitting the jackpot.

That was a new realm of experience for me.

(FIREWORKS BURSTING)

MONA-MATHUS: Nobody was doing what she was doing at that time.

MURTAUGH: There was nobody like her.

-(SUZANNE LAUGHS) -Suzanne Ciani is here with us now.

Would you welcome her, please, to the Morning Show.

-Hi, Suzanne, how are you? -Great.

In advertising, uniqueness is everything.

Being the first is everything.

Nowadays, I have access to an incredibly wide variety of sounds.

-Just about any sound. -Uh-huh.

(ELECTRONIC WHOOPING)

ROB ZANTAY: You know, there's a whole different way to do music,

accompanying a visual.

And that's what Suzanne's expertise was, was sound design.

-This one you've heard. -That sounds familiar.

-Where would we have heard that? -(DESCENDING SCALE PLAYS)

-That's kind of a PBS-type sound. -Yeah.

SUZANNE: There was this concept of sound effects,

and what I realized is that I could do what I called musical effects,

because I could control the musical parameters

of a sound.

(DOOR HISSES OPEN)

(BUTTON CLICKS)

And it worked in a much more integrated way,

and on a much higher level, psychologically and musically.

(ELECTRONIC WHIRRING)

And so, in order to take full advantage of the potential

I started my own music house and I did the whole thing.

COMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: Finally, there is a fuel-efficient car

that does more than get you from point A to point B.

When I met her, she had a company called Ciani-Musica.

SUZANNE: We became the number one company for sound design

and high technology in New York.

COMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: AT&T.

CHRIS IANUZZI: I remember going to the library

and looking through the magazines.

There was a contemporary keyboard and Suzanne Ciani was on the cover.

And I thought,

"I've got to meet her, I've got to go to New York."

I've got to work for her.

RUTH: I knew she was getting big because you turn on the television, and then,

"Oh! Suzi wrote that."

It was everywhere.

MONA-MATHUS: There was Lincoln-Mercury.

There was ITT,

Skittles,

Black & Decker,

Sunkist.

There was Merrill Lynch. The Bull in the China Shop.

COMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: Picking and choosing the right investments

-requires very careful handling. -(ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYS)

One wrong move could easily damage the best laid plans.

SUZANNE: "Bull in the China Shop,"

what a perfect poetry to do sound to.

I think for me, you know, it was about the dignity of the bull

and that you wanted to give people confidence.

And so I used a classical theme.

And so as the bull marches through,

it picks up in intensity a little bit, and he does get through.

And then there's the logo at the end

which lets you know that you can sleep well at night,

because your money is safe with Merrill Lynch. (LAUGHS)

We were doing quite a few spots for Atari.

And we were the perfect match for them,

because, you know, we were the high-tech music cast.

(ATARI GALAXIAN JINGLE PLAYING)

We were called to do a commercial for Atari.

It was called, Nobody's Hotter Than Atari This Summer.

And a lot of people got involved in that.

You know, I laid the drum sound under the bass sequence.

SUZANNE: It was kind of like a music video.

You know, the image was that all these kids

were marching with their boom boxes,

you know, on the sand,

and the sky would light up with Atari imagery.

(JINGLE CONTINUES PLAYING)

TV JOURNALIST: It seemed like an ordinary assignment.

SUZANNE: Let's welcome him to the neighborhood.

JOURNALIST: I was supposed to meet the queen of musical effects.

(SYNTHESIZED PHONE RINGS)

But I was about to find out that Suzanne Ciani

makes a living turning the ordinary...

(SYNTHESIZED DOOR SLAMS)

...into the extraordinary.

MURTAUGH: She's conceptual. She's creative.

She doesn't need you to describe the sound.

They would tell you, you know, we have an airplane, or a washing machine,

or we're gonna be jumping off a mountain top

and she would create a sound perspective that would work perfectly.

It heightens the reality to doctor the sound in certain ways.

The same way people airbrush models' faces

or, you know, in a sense it's cosmetic,

in a sense it's emotional treatment

so that a sound has a certain impact.

(SYNTHESIZED SPLASHING)

SUZANNE: A lot of what I did was married to an image.

So there was a visual, you know?

Black & Decker, you could see the visual of the motor,

you know, whacking the weed.

(SYNTHESIZED SLASHING)

-The real sound always fell short. -(POPS)

If you had a potato chip commercial

and you needed the sound of a crunching potato chip.

(SNAPS)

And you would record somebody biting the potato chip.

It never sounded like much of anything.

You know, traditional instruments had a limited palette.

(PLAYS SINGLE NOTE)

Electronics added thousands of colors

that weren't there before.

You could create a sound

(ELECTRONIC SOUNDS PLAY)

that had all the fantasy that you would imagine that thing having.

MERRIN: We had an assignment to do a GE dishwasher commercial.

And it was my opportunity to use

this kind of electronic genius I heard about Suzanne Ciani,

and she created a, what we call, the beep soundtrack.

This is where you cut to the commercial so you can see it.

(RHYTHMIC BEEPING)

SUZANNE: The GE beep was generated by the reality

that the new dishwasher that GE was making

had a beeping sound.

(BEEPING)

And they came to me to post score it.

MONA-MATHUS: It was painstaking.

The preciseness of just, like, the melody of the lights, and the sound,

the right little sound for the lights.

SUZANNE: Also because, in those days, there was no way to lock

a multi-track to a video.

You had to start the multi-track

and start the video by hand each time you wanted to check,

you know, whether the beep was in the right place.

You have no idea how complicated this was.

You know what? Were those scenes the same?

They're slightly different.

Because that's not running together.

When the first one's on, the second one's off.

(PLAYING NOTES)

All I can say is that the spot was a challenge,

and I created the personality of the machine.

ZANTAY: I remember the people from the ads said,

"We want a beep, but it can't be an annoying beep.

"It has to be a friendly beep."

You just... Sometimes you'd wanna say, "What are you talking about?

"A friendly beep?" But she'll go, "Of course. Of course. A friendly beep."

SUZANNE: The client absolutely went crazy when they heard it.

So the commercial won, you know, awards.

ZANTAY: It was a huge success.

COMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: The GE 2800 dishwasher.

It does almost everything but clear the table.

(GE JINGLE PLAYS)

(BEEPS)

Well, in a moment, we'll meet a musician

whose playful experiments with electricity

may be the forerunners of a new approach

to both listening and learning.

SUZANNE: (VOICE DISTORTED) Welcome to Xenon.

Welcome to Xenon.

Welcome to Xenon.

Welcome to Xenon.

Welcome to Xenon.

SUZANNE: I was in New York. I guess it was about 1980.

A lot of stuff was happening that year.

That's when I got the film score,

The Incredible Shrinking Woman,

and I was contacted by Bally in Chicago

about designing sounds for a pinball game.

"Okay. Why not?"

MAN 1: When did you first get involved with this?

Like, was the machine all designed already?

No. As a matter of fact, I went to Chicago and they had the blueprints.

So it hadn't even been, uh, finished, designed yet.

They had schematics.

And they had the whole blueprint, and then I went to the art department,

and they showed me this drawing.

I thought, "Uh-oh. (LAUGHS)

"I hope I'm not denigrating women."

(ELECTRONIC SOUNDS PLAY)

I was very interested in getting the whole composition to work.

To think of the pinball as actually playing a piece.

So I can put in

just a series of pitches.

Okay, now I'm gonna ask it to play

and see what it does here.

(RHYTHMIC BEEPING)

So did they involve you, like, did they want your voice,

or were they more interested in the technology behind it?

You know, they had two chips.

-So this was the first time that they had two chips. -Right.

And one was a little electronic generator

and one was a sampler for voice.

-Okay. -And so I had, like,

a very little bit of time on the sampling.

(VOICE DISTORTED) Try tube shock.

Try tube shock.

Try tube shock.

Try tube shock.

Suzanne has this amazing speaking voice.

And it isn't just what she says, it's how she says it.

SUZANNE: One, two, three.

MURTAUGH: There's a sound in her voice that is so...

If they brought back HAL as a computer, it would be Suzanne's voice.

(VOICE HEAVILY DISTORTED) Xenon.

SUZANNE: You know, I was watching people play pinball games

and I realized how it would produce a sound

and then you would responded to that sound.

So when you hit the bumper, it would go... (GRUNTING)

(DISTORTED GRUNTING)

When I looked at that artwork,

I thought, well, you know, this is a very sensual game that people are playing.

So I had the idea that maybe there could be

a little whip sound on the flippers, you know. (LAUGHS)

And you'd whip, and then it would go... (MOANING)

You know? And that one they weren't ready for.

MAN 2: This is our sound chip, and this is our speech.

SUZANNE: Great.

Okay, we are all set.

-Ready? -And we close this door.

Would you like to go first? Power up.

SUZANNE: Power up.

(GAME POWERING UP)

(DISTORTED VOICES PLAYING)

SUZANNE: (VOICE DISTORTED) Welcome to Xenon.

SUZANNE: I wanted technology to be sensual.

That was always my directive.

MERRIN: The advertising world at the time was...

A male-dominated world.

For Suzanne to be such a force in the industry was incredibly unique.

PETER BAUMANN: I remember that I met Suzanne in New York.

And that she was quite famous for the Coca-Cola commercial she did.

Of course, it was extraordinary

for a woman to be in the music business

other than a background singer,

you know, or a pop star.

MONA-MATHUS: We were doing something together as women

that required us to perfect our craft,

because we wanted to be taken seriously, and we wanted to succeed.

IANUZZI: What she really wanted to do from the beginning,

was she wanted to be a recording artist.

She wanted to make Suzanne's albums.

SUZANNE: Advertising gave me the financial means

of outfitting myself

with a proper laboratory and the gear that I wanted to use.

I'd like to give you a short tour of my studio.

In the corner, I have a vintage Buchla

that I've had for over ten years.

Then I have, uh, two drum machines here.

An earlier model of Roland and a Linn.

At one point, I thought, you know, I don't need anybody else to do this.

I don't need a record label to say,

"Make us an album, you know? We want your album.

"We think you're wonderful."

I knew that I could just make it and that's what I did.

This is all the pitch.

So you don't have to really be able to sing to do this.

So it's great.

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

SUZANNE: I look at Seven Waves and I think...

What I was trying to do was create a very sensual,

feminine, romantic, passionate, emotional music

using machines.

So I did that album, and since I had now something on tape

I went to do another round at the record companies.

And I even went to Europe.

There was a group, Tangerine Dream,

that was starting to get some notoriety,

and I thought, "Ah, it's probably easier in Europe."

So I went all over Europe

and couldn't get to first base.

Then one day, I thought...

Japan.

In America, when you have a record meeting,

you know, the phones are ringing,

people are walking in and out, nobody listens.

In Japan, you go into to a listening room.

No telephones, nobody comes in there.

You have tea and you have a couch, and you have the speakers.

And they sit, and they listen.

It was astonishing.

In the United States, nobody had listened.

So I like to tell myself that part of the reason

that the Japanese wanted this album

was that they actually listened to it.

-(APPLAUSE) -Synthesized music is something

that is taken very, very seriously

in the world of music, and this is an album.

Once I had the Japanese deal, it was a lot easier for me

because I had a product, so I had a record,

and record companies, you know, noticed a bit more.

I don't think I see anything in here.

I think I looked at all these already.

(GASPS)

Okay. (CHUCKLES)

Oh, my God.

Now this is mis-categorized.

This is definitely not...

This is definitely not rock.

This was my second album.

(SOULFUL MUSIC PLAYING)

The second album, The Velocity of Love,

the song on that, The Velocity of Love,

was the first time I had used acoustic piano.

And that one, actually,

is probably my best-known song to date.

(PIANO PLAYING)

To get music out in our culture,

you have to belong to a category.

You have to fit into a compartment

where they can't market it, they can't put it some place.

I remember, you know, my early album Seven Waves.

I mean, I was in jazz, I was in classical,

I was in electronic, I was in vocal, I was in...

You know, there was no place for the album.

Then, finally, there came this category, new age.

And I was grateful, because now there was

at least a place to put the music where people could find it.

There's a quiet revolution happening in the world today

dealing with meditation, reflection and inner peace.

FEMALE REPORTER: And it's all being called, New Age.

(KENNY G PLAYING)

MALE REPORTER: Among the more mainstream artists are Kenny G

whose Songbird was a top-five hit.

Mannheim Steamroller, whose many albums

include their popular renditions of Christmas standards.

And Tangerine Dream

familiar to moviegoers for their many film scores,

among them, Risky Business.

Former Tangerine Dream group member

Peter Baumann now heads his own record company.

New age is a category, uh,

that the late-night talk shows make fun of.

WOMAN 2: My sister's having a baby

and, uh, she is having a natural childbirth,

so we just decided to get some music for her.

You know, so that the baby, when it's born,

can come into beautiful sounds.

It, in some cases, doesn't quite get the credibility

as other music has.

New age is an interesting topic.

It's like a club that nobody wants to belong to.

BAUMANN: It's usually for...

Shall I say, a different personality type?

You know, it's more reflective.

You just got your new CD player you're a bit too old

for rock-and-roll

and classical music, for you, might be a little cerebral,

and jazz is a little esoteric,

but you wanna be part of what's going on in music.

KITARO: This is called the waterphones.

(ETHEREAL CLANGING)

KITARO: Sometimes we can see the energies, the visible,

but I believe more than the visible energies.

Invisible energy is more inside of the body,

and inside of the soul.

So, that's the new age musics came out a long time ago.

(MELANCHOLIC MUSIC PLAYING)

You know, the old day the listener need to have an experience

with the sounds.

We have, uh, the cassette tape, put it, they put it.

The peoples listening

and then walking in the forest...

Wow!

And then the title is, like, uh, you know,

the Forest Magic or something. (CHUCKLES)

Yeah.

(MUSIC CONTINUES PLAYING)

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

SUZANNE: Nature, you know, brings us peace,

it gives us confidence that the world works

without us.

This is all orchestrated, not by us,

we didn't plan it.

It's just here and it's perfect.

But the other thing about nature is that

it's a little bit more chaotic.

It's like birds and Bach, you know?

(BIRD CAWING)

The birds are beautiful, but it's not composed.

So, for me, nature is

a spiritual starting point

because it brings me peace

and a calmness.

And that's what my music is about.

(PIANO PLAYING)

It was interesting to me, that in my period of electronic devotion,

I actually didn't wanna touch the piano,

even though it had been my childhood instrument.

I'd like to show you my next album Neverland.

This is recorded on Private Music.

My albums, from Neverland on, I think showed a progression

gradually back towards acoustic instruments.

(ORCHESTRA AND PIANO PLAY)

The piano was just a perfect universe

to come back to.

Because when I played it, I appreciated it even more.

-(APPLAUSE) -The expressiveness that it had.

My theory was, was that if I could express

my deepest, personal emotions and feelings,

that it actually would touch something universal.

Neverland was a romantic song,

and I have to say, my heart was broken,

but in the video, you know, it's a song about a horse

coming along the beach

and finding this little girl who's building a sand castle.

She suddenly grows into a woman,

gets on the horse, and he takes her up into the sky to her prince.

And that was really my concept of romantic love,

was the prince.

(DRAMATIC PIANO PLAYING)

SUZANNE: My personal life

was very integrated into my musical life.

Even if I lived with somebody,

it would be, like, five minutes in the morning,

and then five minutes at night.

MERRIN: Her studio was actually her living room

and it was just full of giant mixing boards,

machines that were blinking on and off

wires going absolutely everywhere, and she's plugging stuff in.

MONA-MATHUS: You were in her house, you had to take your shoes off.

Nobody was allowed to come in the apartment with the shoes on,

which, for advertising folks that came to the door,

they were oftentimes shocked

in that, "Do we really have to take our shoes off?"

And it was like, "Yes, you do."

It wasn't like she was faster

than going into a regular studio

with musicians and instruments.

This actually could be maddeningly slow

'cause she had to program everything, you know,

and, you know, it was just so different then.

MURTAUGH: You didn't know how long things were gonna take.

Would the machines, you know, blow up?

Would the wires come apart?

Would things not work? Would the sounds not be right?

How do you fix it? How do you change it? It was... A lot of time was spent.

First of all, you can see there's a lot of pressure in this business.

I mean, it happens very fast.

MERRIN: She was constantly working.

MONA-MATHUS: You had to work. You had to put in that kind of work

in order to be the best at what she was doing,

in order to achieve that kind of success that she had.

MERRIN: The time pressure in advertising

is always, you know...

"We need it right now." "What do you mean now?"

"I mean, really, now. Tomorrow morning."

The commercials are like, you know...

(STUTTERS) You have to go fast. This whole, "Time is money."

MONA-MATHUS: We worked 12-hour days, 14-hour days,

we worked weekends, overnights.

I woke up this morning and I saw these circles under my eyes,

and I thought, you know,

"These circles are brought to you by Pepsi."

(ALL LAUGHING)

MERRIN: It was really hard work.

It was frantic.

SUZANNE: I was going full blast.

And I ran out of medicine that I was supposed to take.

The doctor said, "Well, I can't give you a prescription for these

"unless you go and get checked."

I said, "I can't get checked,

"I'm in the middle of an album."

"I'm in production."

"I don't have time to go to a doctor."

So I took a morning off, and I went to the doctor,

and they did some kind of testing,

and they said, "I'm really sorry to tell you this,

"but it looks like you might have breast cancer."

I basically panicked.

It was a time of...

Terrible crisis, really.

When you face your mortality,

and it comes out of the blue like that,

it's an alarm that makes you shift gears.

I made a decision that I had to leave New York, ASAP.

I only stayed there long enough

to have radiation treatment.

I really thought I had a mandate to leave because of the breast cancer.

I thought New York, all the excitement and the stress,

and all the things I loved about it,

but I just made up in my mind,

that that's was, like, maybe it was killing me.

You know, maybe it wasn't healthy.

So I just left it.

Here we are at the edge of the Earth here,

or at least the United States.

So this is a pretty far western point here.

Um...

There is San Francisco,

this is the ocean, there is Stinson Beach.

And this kind of spherical space

is amazing because you see the horizon line,

and the dome of the sky, and the theater of the ocean,

and all the waves, the sound of the waves,

and, uh, you know, the surfers are out here every day.

I'm more of an observer than an actual surfer,

but this is where I moved in 1992.

(MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING)

You know, I had missed a good part of my...

You know, romantic life, just by working so hard in New York.

So, in a way, I thought, "Well, now I am in California,

"and I'm in a more relaxed situation

"I'm out of the fast lane in New York,

"and I really do have time

"for doing something personal."

It's Joe.

He was 18-and-a-half years younger than I was.

We were just very happy. I was happy. Everybody was happy.

We were married in 1994,

and we were divorced, officially, I think in 2001.

I think the idealism that I had about love

disappeared at that point.

Some of the songs that I wrote then, I could never write now.

I don't have, you know, that same...

Bubbly, cloudy, romantic,

mysterious concept.

I can still play the songs,

but my writing is not about that

anymore.

So, maybe it's perfect

for me to go back to electronic music.

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

As I say, I've been living under a rock

for years now, as far as electronic music

has been going on.

I haven't paid attention.

Andy Votel at Finders Keepers contacted me,

and they said they wanted to release

my unreleased early electronic music.

He released them, and suddenly,

there was this rush of attention that happened.

I somehow have been reincarnated

as an electronic composer again.

(AUDIENCE CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)

For me, it is just you know, astonishing to come out and see

that there's this huge audience now for this experience.

(ABSTRACT ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING)

(APPLAUDING AND CHEERING)

So now I have this legion of new fans.

These kids in skinny jeans, you know, that show up at my concerts.

LOWE: She's a true innovator.

And what she's done is absolutely important

to the history and the development of electronic music.

DORIT CHRYSLER: She found her own way.

She had to find her own way.

MURTAUGH: Music people stay young because they're always creating.

And music, more people discover it all the time.

ANNOUNCER: I am very happy to introduce

a true legend of electronic music,

-Suzanne Ciani. -(LAUGHS)

(ALL APPLAUDING AND CHEERING)

SUZANNE: I'm not an expert on all of this,

but I have noticed some of the same bearded people

that were new agers

are now ambient.

This generation is aware that they missed something.

They wanna know, like, "Okay, wait a minute,

"what was analog like?

"What were LPs like? What were cassettes like?

"We didn't have that."

And, so, it's fun for me

'cause I've already been there.

There have been so many chapters in my career,

and I'm still open

to there being more unsuspected chapters.

Because if there's anything that my life has shown me,

is that you just don't know what's gonna happen.

There used to be a house here,

and the house was two-thirds gone

when I moved here,

and, eventually, the owner took the water rights

and relocated.

And then I was able to buy this little piece,

and add it,

and make this wonderful, kind of unnerving precipice.

Clearly, I'm on the edge.

And it's kind of a race, who's gonna last longer.

Me, or the place where I live.

You know, people say, "Well, what's, what's gonna happen?"

"Do you know?"

I could ask a geological engineer

and he could say, "Well, this and that,

"and the scientific evidence is this and that,"

but, for me, I got peace of mind

really just asking my astrologer

and she said, "Don't worry, you're fine.

"There's nothing in your chart

"that says you're going to lose your home."

So that, I don't know what that means,

but it means that in my lifetime,

however long that is, I'll be here.

So, that's all I ask.

You get a little fatalistic at a certain age

you know, when you're younger, you don't even see the edge.

And once you've gone over that,

you know, certain time frame,

you're looking at the horizon.

You know, I notice changes,

I notice things that have come and gone,

but I've always been romantic.

I mean, my music, everything I've done, artistically,

has been based in the concept of romanticism.

But I don't know if that can be whittled down to,

you know, just rapport between men and women.

My romanticism is with life itself.

You know, I like to see the best

in life.

The romance, the beauty.

And I choose to see that.

(WAVES CRASHING)

(ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING)