[10] One artist she cites as a big influence is German photographer Ilse Bing, who provided lyrics and drawings to her track "Lumière", along with classical music composers and pianist Glenn Gould.

"[14] She spent time with a Buchla synthesizer in a rented studio at the tape music center at Mills College in Oakland, paying $5 for each visit.

[8] She took a summer course in computer music at Stanford University[8] where she was taught by Max Mathews,[15] John Chowning, and Leland Smith at the Artificial Intelligence Lab.

[17][8][13][10] In a 2019 interview with Michelle Macklem for a feature about her in the KCRW podcast series Lost Notes, Ciani recounted that she and several other employees were keen to learn more about using the synthesizer, so she approached Ed Buchla and asked if he would conduct tutorial sessions for them.

Ciani also started a furniture company but ceased after six months as the result of two "unsaleable" designs, theft, fire, and vandalism.

[8] In 1970, she released her debut record, Voices of Packaged Souls (1970), a collaboration with sculptor Harold Paris, put together using music concrète techniques at radio station KPFA in Berkeley during the night shift.

She later wrote that she was "homeless and happy" at this time and moved from the loft of art critic Robert Hughes to the floor of Philip Glass's basement recording studio.

[22] The sound of a bottle of Coca-Cola being opened and poured was one of Ciani's most widely recognized works and was used in radio and television commercials in the late 1970s.

[25] In 1979, Ciani was commissioned to provide sounds to the pinball machine game Xenon, which featured her own voice fed through a vocoder.

Ciani then sampled her voice onto a sound chip with the aim of selling it for use in other applications, including elevator announcements.

[28] The producers agreed for her to perform her own music with the show's house band, but they cut to a commercial break when they started to play.

[2] Ciani reasoned this to the difficulty American record labels had in selling an electronic album by a female artist that lacked vocals.

The album was produced using an MC-8 and MC-4 sequencer, a Prophet 5 synthesizer, a Roland TR-808 drum machine,[33] the Buchla 200, Bode Vocoder, Lyricon, Synclavier, Polymoog, and Arp and Eventide Processing.

[36] In 1992, the soap opera One Life to Live introduced a new theme song written and performed by Ciani, who also did scoring for several episodes of the show.

1999's Turning featured her first composition with lyrics, in the title track, sung by Taiwanese artist Chyi Yu.

[11] In 2016, Ciani released Sunergy, a collaboration using Buchla synthesizers with the musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, as part of the RVNG Intl.

[40] In May 2017, Ciani became the first woman to receive a Moog Music Innovation Award at the annual electronic festival Moogfest.

[42][43] The show took place at Gray Area in San Francisco on March 5, 2016, presented in four channel quadraphonic sound.

[44] A recording of this performance was one of the first quadraphonic LP vinyl releases in over 30 years[45] and used an encoding process based on the QS Regular Matrix system.

Inspired by the Buchla 227 quad output module, the $227 release was a very limited edition of only 227 numbered, 45 rpm, 180g quadraphonic vinyl discs sold.