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

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> 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.

people can perform equally, but they have to do this consciously. which
is a problem, because they will fatigue more quickly.

obviously there are instruments and instruments when it comes to latency.
violinist probably don't have much of a problem, but instruments with a
hard attack are more likely to have.
additionally, instruments where the sound is the only feedback you get,
are heavily depending on low latencies.
for example (i think i bring this example every time we discuss on
this), we had a clarinetist here, who did not play clarinet but a
wind-controller (a midi-box with a mouth-piece), controlling some
hardware synthesizers. he is used to playing this instrument.

he keeps telling me (i just met him 3 days ago), that it was a pain to
play with our pd-based system (which just _added_ another 15-25ms
(cannot remember; it was not _very low_ though) to hist breath->midi
converter latency, and hist hardware synth latency).

he gradually became louder in order to minimize the latency (with
physical wind instruments this helps), and after 1 hour of playing he
almost collapsed (ok, that's a bit exaggerated)

m,gsdft
IOhannes