Music By Suzanne
About Suzanne, Media Composer
From a young age I’ve been interested in creating music. I loved all the little nuances and ‘twiddly bits’ I could hear in any piece I came across. Back then I wasn’t actually so attracted to the main theme or even the rhythms but tuned more into the embellishments and quirky elements within a piece of music. As a child we had the wonderful Peter and the Wolf on cassette and I spent many nights in bed listening while Prokofiev’s masterpiece worked its magic on my young impressionable mind. I grew up listening to the likes of Jean-Michel Jarre and Jan Hammer and taught myself to play their pieces on the keyboard, by ear. I wasn’t the kind of kid who could sit down and play through daily scales’ practice and was stubborn enough to believe that since I had already begun to write my own music, I didn’t need to learn notation. Having to choose between art and music then, in high school, I chose the former and therefore didn’t pursue any educational tuition in music. By the time I was 18 I had taught myself to play the guitar and spent many a late night recording new ideas, creating layers from tape to tape.
Life happened, as they say, then fast forward (somewhat!) to 2016. My husband and young daughter bought me an iPad mini for Christmas. With this I started to teach myself animation. Frame-by-frame drawing. A wonderful, if time-consuming, experience I thoroughly enjoyed. And, full circle, this led me back into creating sound effects for the animations and writing scores to compliment the images.
The following year a Freecycle post came up offering an old upright piano to a new home. This prompted the next musical chapter in my life and I went on to upgrade that old Piano to a Yamaha U3. I finally signed up for piano lessons in 2021 and haven’t looked back since.
With age comes clarity and it’s clear, now, that writing music is what I am meant to do. It started as a passion, many moons ago, but now I am slowly making this into my career. I’ve done some social singing in a modern choir, which introduced me to three part harmonies; I’ve performed at festivals in a Brazilian samba band, playing timbau; and I’m currently studying for an MA in Professional Media Composition, learning how to write with even more emotion to tell compelling stories.
To be able to help influence how an audience feels when watching the moving image is something which drives my passion.
Feel free to get in touch if you have a project you’d like to chat about.
