Wild. One of Santa Cruz’s most unlikely neighbors, Jaron Lanier, helped pioneer virtual reality: computer-generated worlds you can step into with a headset. Now the computer scientist and musician is writing a piano concerto for the Santa Cruz Symphony.
His duet partner is Serene, a former Google engineer who became a concert pianist without attending conservatory. When we talked Wednesday morning, he explained how he is using artificial intelligence to build his own composing software. The idea: give artists more control over what they make.
At Microsoft, his title is Prime Unifying Scientist. He is careful to add, “I speak for myself, not for the company.” He has collaborated with Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, and George Clinton. This month he was in Washington at the Pro-Human Assembly, where Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon ended up speaking a few feet apart. “What really brought them together is this negative feeling about AI,” he told me. “In a way, Silicon Valley brought the country together by making everybody uncomfortable with us.”
And he lives in our redwood town, as he did briefly as a teenager in the 1970s. On May 2 and 3, the Santa Cruz Symphony closed its season with Beethoven’s Ninth, and Lanier was on the bill. The plan had been bigger: a new piano concerto for pianist Serene. It did not get finished. “Originally the idea was to do it this year,” he said. So conductor Daniel Stewart led the orchestra through an earlier Lanier piece for the khaen, the free-reed mouth organ of Laos, and Lanier played the instrument himself. “It was like a real high,” he said. “It was a beautiful experience being with that orchestra and the really cool audiences.”
A headset can put a virtual world in front of one pair of eyes. An orchestra needs a room, a score, and dozens of people willing to be wrong in public together. “I just like trying to bring a whole bunch of musicians together at once,” he said.
The software is a custom music editor designed for this one piece. Asking an AI model to make the song, he said, is “kind of soulless and pointless.” Asking it to build your editor is different, because every music editor is its own language and culture. In his view, working in Logic can lead to different music than working in Ableton Live. “You have more options to become an artist than if you’re using somebody else’s editor,” he said. “It actually increases the artist’s agency instead of decreasing it.”
My read, not his: slop is what happens when a hundred million people use the same vending machine. A tool built for one pair of hands offers a way to resist that sameness. It is also his oldest idea, moved from worlds to instruments. Virtual reality was never meant to be a place you visit. It was meant to be a place you build.
He pointed to his MIT friend Sherry Turkle’s new “Artificial Intimacy” and testimony in Washington from parents who lost children after chatbot conversations. He also cautioned, “If you overstate your criticisms, it actually doesn’t help anybody.”
What comes next? The symphony’s 2026-27 season lists “Jaron Lanier: Singularity Variations” as a world premiere, with Serene at the piano, on January 16 and 17, 2027. Lanier described a piece built on canon, the same melody chasing itself, but did not confirm whether it is the scheduled premiere. He also has a radio-drama podcast with neuroscientist David Eagleman about inhabiting future brains, a television project he cannot announce yet, and a spring show at Kuumbwa Jazz Center next year.
He’s building his own tools to write for an orchestra. His message: go make your own instrument, then find a room full of people to play it with. Join us on January 16, at the Civic Auditorium. ■
MORE—Explore the Santa Cruz Symphony’s adventurous 2026–27 season in Christina Waters’ “Season of Sound”, featuring Daniel Stewart’s unexpected musical pairings and AI-assisted artwork.
