[PD-ot] how low (latency) can you go?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Honestly, I doubt you could tell the difference between 4ms and 14ms  
in a blind test.  There have been many studies on this.  If you can  
detect such tiny differences in onset time, you would be superhuman.

For a tonal sound like a piano, humans perceive two sounds as one if  
they have an onset within 30ms of each other.  Humans can perceive  
such tiny temporal details, but this is for timbral perception rather  
than onset perception.

So my guess as to what is happening is that you can recognize the  
differences and it is something that has been deemed a source of  
annoyance.  But when it comes down to it, all of the studies I have  
seen clearly show that musicians can perform equally at latencies  
around 50ms versus much lower latencies.

I've always wanted to make a set of patches to illustrate these  
concepts.  I've had a couple, but they take a while to write since  
they have to be quite precise.  There are lots of very interesting  
concepts of perception that are quite stunning when you try them  
yourself.  It feels like of like you are hacking your brain, trying  
to figure out how it works.

.hc

On Dec 17, 2006, at 11:37 PM, marius schebella wrote:

> hi,
> from my own experience (hitting keyboard keys, using microphones  
> for voice or drumming) everything above 4 ms is irritating and  
> therefore a pain.
> marius.
>
> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> So, my whole point with all this is to say that you really don't  
>> need to worry so much about latency to have a very playable  
>> computer instrument.  So if you want to make art, spend your time  
>> making art instead of getting a few less milliseconds of latency  
>> in your setup.
>> If you what to improve the technology, then please publish what  
>> you did (blog it, put it on a website, article, magazine,  
>> textbook...), and write code and get it out there.
>> .hc



------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.