As one of the pioneering synth and experimental music figureheads in the US, Suzanne Ciani’s influence has reverberated through generations of musicians and sound designers. But it was the influence of another synth legend that would prove pivotal in her own musical life. While studying music composition at Berkeley in the late ’60s, Ciani met analogue instrument designer Don Buchla. Fascinated with the sonic possibilities of his creations, she would become Buchla’s apprentice, helping him assemble the instruments that share his name. Ciani’s prowess on the Buchla became the basis for a career, leading to her composing scores for numerous TV campaigns. Most famously, it’s Ciani’s synth-craft behind the iconic “pop and pour” sound effect of ’70s Coca-Cola adverts.

Native Instruments called Ciani up at her Californian beachside retreat to discuss her performance at Terraforma festival — a dramatic showcase in the gardens of Villa Arconati outside of Milan, in which her set was cut ten minutes short by a huge power cut — in addition to her approach to technicalities, work at the Berklee College of Music, and experience with collaborative performances.

When I call up Ciani, it is one year to the day since Don Buchla passed away. In the background, you can hear the sea crash against the coastline, and it is these two elements — the instruments of Buchla, and the sound of waves — that have tied her work together. Since Andy Votel began re-releasing her work through Finders Keepers Records in 2012, Ciani has become a more prominent force through her performances and talks. Earlier this year, a documentary about Ciani’s life and work — A Life in Waves — was debuted at South by Southwest.

As we talk, Ciani often pauses and asks me to listen to the ocean. “Can you hear it?”

A little bit.

Well, I live in this sound, and it’s no accident that all my concerts come from the ocean. That’s been the sonic reference for practically my whole life. My first album was called Seven Waves; it was the waves connecting the pieces; the pieces born out of waves.

How long have you been by the coast?

For 25 years. I was living in New York City for 19 years, and then one day I said, “I’ve got to get out.”

And this was when you had the composition company Ciani/Musica?

Yes. I was at the top of my game, but I had a scare with breast cancer, so I moved from the middle of the city to the coast. That was as big a change as I could make.

For Terraforma, how much did they let you prepare in the environment in which you were going to play?

It was outdoors, and that can always be a little bit risky. I was a little freaked because before soundcheck, it just started to rain, and I have only one Buchla [synth] — Don Buchla passed away exactly a year ago today, [and] it’s irreplaceable.

Can you explain how your quadraphonic setup works? Were you confident that it’d be suitable for the venue at Terraforma?

They picked this garden, and the beauty of this setup was that it was more conducive to a surround sound experience, with people standing around me.

The important thing with the quadraphonic is that all four speakers are equal. I noticed in my travels that [this isn’t widely understood]. In the early days of quadraphonic, the industry didn’t know what to do about it, so they minimised the importance of the back speakers. They said, “Oh, we’re replicating a concert hall, and we’re going to give you some of the reverberant, back-of-the-room experience.”

Therefore, right from the start, quadraphonic was doomed because it wasn’t interesting for acoustic music. But the natural domain of electronic music is spatial. Electronic sound naturally wants to move. If the sound sits there, it’s not expressing — it’s not alive. Once you start to move the sound in a purposeful way, it stops being random. Controlling space is a conscious set of choices and from the beginning, with Don Buchla in the late ’60s, we always played in quadraphonic.

How do you control quadraphonic sound?

Don [Buchla] had a quadraphonic interface for the output. You had a voltage-controlled spatial location parameter called Swirl. You can push a button and go into Swirl mode, which is continuous panning that can go right to left, left to right. With voltage control, you can speed it up and slow it down. So it’s all very malleable.

Another really important control has to do with discrete location as opposed to continuous. This is very effective because in spatial environments there’s this phenomenon that we all know called [auditory] masking. If you are near a speaker, you’re going to hear that one before you hear other speakers, but with discrete location you very quickly move a sound from one discrete location to another. It’s a rhythmic motion that anybody can hear because the sound is only in one speaker at a time, pretty much.

If it’s too discrete, if the sound’s precisely in one speaker or some place, it’s a little unsettling, and so what I do is have two spatial setups. One of them gives me the option of being discrete and the other one creating fill, so there’s never a completely naked spot.

The other part of the spatial is the processing. In the early days we had voltage-controlled reverb, which meant that the space could go close and far away instantaneously — it was amazing. We don’t have that today. I use two Eventide H9 boxes for my processing. They’re nice and small, and I’m trying to get Eventide to add voltage control for the reverb mix, so that I can add and remove the effect.

How do you integrate the Eventide units into your setup? And can you contrast this with voltage-controlled reverb?

When I started using Eventides and I had four channels, I realised the [Eventide] boxes are stereo. At first, I thought I needed two boxes to process more channels, but then I thought, “Let’s simplify this and do the [reverb] processing before the spatial movements.” Now what I do is I go from a mixer into an H9 and I come out of the H9 into this [quadraphonic] spatial processor.

It works, but what you don’t get, yet, is the ability to change the perspective. You can add reverb and make a large space. You can take reverb away and make a small space. But what we used to do [with voltage-controlled reverb], is do that on a beat. You’re able to instantaneously control the amount of reverb and it becomes a rhythmic experience creating an illusionary space that’s constantly shifting dimensions.

Instead of sitting in a big reverbed room and then in a quiet non-reverb room, you are going from one to the other instantly and it’s an amazing experience.