A collaboration between Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani, both playing Buchla synthesizers.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's formative years were spent communing with nature on Orcas Island in the northwest region of Washington state, a place she describes as "one of the most magical and peaceful places I have ever been." Though she wouldn't begin experimenting with modular synthesis until many years later, her creative work continues to be infused with and inspired by the vitality and serenity of Orcas.

Smith left the island to attend Berklee College of Music, where she studied composition and sound engineering, initially focusing on her voice as her primary instrument, before switching to classical guitar and piano. She employed many of the skills she refined in college in her indie-folk band Ever Isles, but a fateful encounter with a neighbor who lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer, had a profound effect on her. Mesmerized by the Buchla’s potential, she explains "I got so distracted and enamored with the process of making sounds with it that I abandoned the next Ever Isles album." Starting with rhythmic patterns and melodic pulses, she soon began sculpting lush and exciting worlds of sound.

Suzanne Ciani (born June 4, 1946, in Indianapolis) (www.suzanneciani.com) is an Italian-American five-time Grammy-nominated pianist, composer and recording artist. She is a 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 at 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; if you heard a bottle of Coke being opened and poured on the radio or on television during the late '70s, you were probably hearing Ciani's work. Such was the demand for her services that at one point she was doing up to fifty sessions a week. Her sound effects also appeared in video games (the pinball game Xenon even featured her voice).

Besides the commercials, Ciani scored the Lily Tomlin movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman, and Mother Teresa, as well as scored for the TV daytime serial ("soap opera") One Life to Live.

In 1977, Suzanne Ciani provided the sound effects for Meco's disco version of the Star Wars soundtrack, which was certified platinum. In 1982 she began to record a series of albums in the New Age genre, characterized by a mix of electronic and traditional instruments. Five of her albums, 1988's Neverland , 1991’s Hotel Luna, 1994's Dream Suite, 1996’s Pianissimo II, 1999’sTurning, were nominated for Grammy awards. Indie nominations include Turning, Suzanne Ciani and the Wave:Live and Indie winner Silver Ship. She considers herself to be a classical music composer and her more recent albums have emphasized the piano. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.