Virtually Real Virtual Reality : Computer expert and virtual reality prophet Jaron Lanier is making new connections between previously unconnected musical cultures--but on real instruments, not synthetic ones.

Jaron Lanier has invented an absolutely new way of playing music. He plays instruments inside virtual real ity, the ultra-veristic computer simulation that any teen-ager can tell you about.

It works like this: Onstage, Lanier, a dramatically large man with a pale complexion, red hair in long dreadlocks and an unkempt red beard, dons goggles with tiny TV monitors for lenses that seem to transport the wearer directly inside the computer universe.

He puts on the “glove,” to which is attached sensors that, through the motion of the hand, make Lanier feel as though he is moving around in the computer landscape. Through these sensors, he perceives himself to be in an alternate world.

And in this world are virtual instruments of his own design. Some are recognizably similar to the physical instruments we know; some are something else altogether.

To the audience, the real Lanier appears in a trance state, but the audience also watches a video projection of the virtual world he has entered into, and it hears the electronically generated music he produces through loudspeakers.

“It does look unusual,” Lanier says of this style of performance, which he has undertaken on only a few rare occasions. “If I were going to promote myself as a star I would do this kind of performance more, because it’s a very interesting show visually and no one else can do it.”

But Lanier has decided he is not going to promote himself thus.

“I don’t want to be a spectacle in my music,” Lanier confesses, “because that sort of happened to me in my science already.”

Jaron Lanier is a mathematician-turned-celebrated computer scientist. He is one of the principal creators of the virtual reality phenomenon, which is the ultimate multimedia experience and which was prominently featured in last season’s television miniseries “Wild Palms,” produced by Oliver Stone. Lanier invented the glove. Ten years ago, at age 24, he made the cover of Scientific American, and he founded VPL Research, the first company to develop and market virtual reality.

But Lanier is also--in another, parallel life--a musician who has just released his first CD, “Instruments of Change,” on Point Music, the crossover label overseen by Philip Glass. He studied classical music and became an accomplished pianist very young. He also began composing early, writing orchestral works at the age of 13, around the time he started college.

As a teen-ager--taking time off from college--and in his early 20s, Lanier spent time hanging around and performing in Manhattan’s downtown avant-garde new-music scene, where he sometimes got so carried away in his piano playing that his hands would bleed in performance.

Later, in the Bay Area, he worked with a short-lived ensemble, Khayal, begun by Terry Riley, which required that its members be adept at Western classical music, jazz and South Indian raga.

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Now 34, Lanier has managed to find time to master more than 100 instruments from around the globe. His new recording features, among other surpris ing music, Lanier producing weirdly distracted impressionistic tremolos on the piano; Lanier playing his favorite Laotian mouth organ, the khaen ; Lanier producing shimmering resonance from Thai bells; Lanier plucking beautiful effects from Chinese harps.

A traveler in so many worlds--musical and scientific, virtual and real--Lanier would seem to be the ideal oracle to consult about the future of music, about where music might be headed in both the laboratory and the global village. But as is the way of oracles, his answers can be surprising and Sphinx-like.

Still, everything about a meeting with Lanier does, in fact, feel oracular. His TriBeCa loft is an oddly impersonal space. Anonymously furnished, it appears hardly lived in (Lanier also has a cottage in Sausalito). There is a TV, some modest stereo equipment, conventionally functional modern furniture. The only personal touch among the minimalist decor is the reptile intrusion--a stuffed snake on the living room floor, an alligator head that serves as a letter holder on the kitchen counter--a reminder that Lanier grew up in New Mexico.

Then there is the large, cheerfully inscrutable Lanier himself and his laser-beam eyes, which seem made for gluing to a computer screen. He has been much written about for his scientific accomplishments, and one memorable description of him was as a “Rastafarian Hobbit.” He has become a legend for the fortunes he has made and lost--a distracted businessman, he lost control of his company and patents through a French buyout.

He may be mistrusted in the non-technological music world, yet neither Lanier nor his music can be so easily dismissed. Lanier, in his own original manner, appears to be delving into many of the most important issues of our time.

He may be beloved among kids for having invented the ultimate computer game high, now that special virtual reality video game parlors are starting to appear around the country, but both his science and his music are the result of a profound language quest. Lanier’s development of virtual reality came, he claims, almost as a sidelight out of his desire to improve computer languages, which he finds primitive and creatively asphyxiating.

Lanier contends that only with better computer languages can you have your own voice when communicating with a computer. Since he believes eventually all human culture will be transmitted digitally, he insists that making computer languages part of the vernacular is imperative.

“This is no small thing,” Lanier says. “This is a very big deal for the expression of culture in the future.”

And for Lanier that is the where science intersects with art, because he has realized that, for all artists, language is “the ultimate arbitrator of what is real between people.” It was a desire for a more sensual and experiential common base in computer language that led him to develop virtual reality. And, ironically, that is also what has driven him away from the computer almost altogether in his approach to music.

M oreover, Lanier’s ultimate distrust in computer glitz has helped fuel his fascination with traditional instruments, a fascination that has turned into outright obsession.

Acoustic instruments, Lanier has found, provide a much deeper experience than electronic ones, and he thinks the cause is related to some of the issues surrounding the essence of science.

As he explains it, science is not involved with the understanding of truth, as most people think it is, because any scientific idea is true only until new data or better theories come along to replace it.

“Therefore,” Lanier has discovered, “the scientist lives in this universe that’s absolutely mysterious, with these contingent kinds of truth, and that’s a very spiritual sort of foundation for a discipline. The scientist has to accept a deep humility that we never really know.”

All of this “unknowableness” of science, as Lanier calls it, is exactly the same sense of mystery that he experiences when he plays a physical instrument, which, he feels, brings him directly in touch with “that fundamental mysterious thing we call the physical world that science tries to study. And the reason why it’s good for art is because of that mysteriousness.”

But synthesizers, on the other hand, have taken the process of discovery out of the player’s hands and lips. The sound is already there, and that sound was the idea of the engineer who designed it.

“And as soon as you build the idea of a note into an instrument,” Lanier says, “you can no longer discover a note. So instead of contacting this mystery, you’re simply toying with the ideas that you’ve already had, and that contradicts the humility you really need to approach music fresh every time.”

Lanier’s attitude toward art is not an uncommon one among scientists. For many scientists, the arts are exotic and gadgetry is not, and thus they tend to be highly conservative when it comes to their own artistic inclinations. Einstein played only 18th- and 19th-Century music on his violin and never exhibited the slightest interest in the modern music that was deeply influenced by his ideas of time and space. Richard Feynman, the celebrated Caltech physicist and jokester, played conventional pop music on the bongos.

On the other hand, it has been the artists who have used technology in the most seemingly futuristic ways, whether it be Laurie Anderson with her applications of electronic technology to perk up our perceptions of society, or the computer composers at Stanford or UC San Diego busily inventing new sonic perceptions. All are composers who see the computer as liberating them from the confines of old technology--namely, traditional instruments.

For a scientist-musician like Lanier, however, art is to be separated from the gadget-freak aspect of science. Or, as he puts it, “Gadgetness for its own sake is a very powerful seductive force, and it can certainly interfere.”

Yet while there is barely more than a hint of electronics on his CD, Lanier remains, nonetheless, the ultimate musical child of the Electronic Age.

Marshall McLuhan, who is increasingly perceived as the original guru of multimedia, proposed that the Electronic Age will become the era in which everyone’s environment is the entire globe and that humans’ primary function will be information gathering. And in that McLuhan-esque sense of a global village, Lanier is simply the most connected musician there has yet been.

He is, for instance, tireless in his efforts to learn more and more new instruments from around the world.

“I’m always learning,” he says of his passion. “If I’m not learning a new instrument, I feel sick. I have to be learning a new instrument. That’s like a physical requirement for me, for my health.”

And in his learning, Lanier is always making new connections between previously unconnected musical cultures, making new musical synapses that are the equivalent of what McLuhan identified as the essence of the Electronic Age--the process of information rubbing against information.

There is hardly a track on Lanier’s disc that doesn’t combine the sounds or techniques or harmonic modes (or any combination thereof) of at least two cultures completely foreign to each other in time and place.

The implications of this are groundbreaking, because Lanier, the computer expert and prophet, ultimately rejects the computer as an instrument (which has been what we have always thought about when we have thought about future music), while nonetheless embracing the essence of computer thinking in a new kind of global music. But if connectivity is inevitable, as the era of the Internet has proved, it is also, as McLuhan also pointed out, crisis-making.

The clash of cultures that now is occurring throughout civilization has also led to the problems of integrating disparate cultures in big cities as well as the ethnic strife in Eastern Europe and Africa.

In this, Lanier has become his own personal musical laboratory in which the crisis of connectivity is played out, in which information gathering becomes its own sort of irresistible virtual reality creating a great sense of universal belonging that at the same time threatens his personal identity.

“This comes to the heart of what I think is really going to be a dilemma in the next century in our culture,” Lanier says, as he applies it to his own experience.

“I can’t imagine life without the richness of all these ethnic cultures. They’re all deeply a part of me. I would feel terribly limited and oppressed if I was, for some reason, forced to be in any particular one of them. It’s almost like being able to take on different identities. Moreover, by studying many different cultures as deeply as I can, I do think it’s possible to have a sort of metacultural experience now where you just treat the whole world as your culture.”

B ut that has, he confesses, led him into difficulties too, where he has felt a lack of identity, especially in times of crisis.

“I’m really struck that, in our society, many people live with no sure tradition at all, which is both very freeing but at moments of crisis it becomes apparent how much of a lack that really is. For instance, if somebody dies, what exactly do you do? Do you make a traditional funeral or don’t you? You don’t know what to do. So there’s this problem of not knowing what to do when you would like to be able to be on automatic. I don’t know how to resolve those two things.”

One way, though, may be through the example of virtual reality. The virtual world, Lanier finds, can be a new way to connect with other people, since it operates by the sharing of imagination.

Indeed, he sometimes speaks as if virtual reality were more real than plain old reality, as a place where the realization of imagination is tangible and objective, instead of the world of subsumed symbols and words and all of these other inadequate conventions.

But that also sounds like rationalization of the inevitable, which is Lanier’s other dilemma. The sheer appeal of gadgetry is unstoppable, and no multicultural model is going to appeal to the public the way, say, Laurie Anderson’s technological showmanship does, let alone the fun ride of virtual reality.

Virtual reality will clearly overwhelm the art world once it becomes a more readily accessible medium. It will surely overwhelm ethnic music just as American pop music has already become the true world music, unavoidable everywhere. The backbeat has now become the closest thing we have ever had to a universal language. The question now is just how much a visionary like Lanier will be able to control his invention--and whether it will be a Frankenstein.*