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

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, 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.

Most people are superhuman until science tells them that they're not. 
That's why a lot of people hate science. ;)

> 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.

Yes, it's easy to perceive changes of 1ms or even less, if one is playing 
twice exactly the same sounds at opposed phases, because you can listen to 
how exactly certain frequencies are getting cancelled and others not (and 
that's the same as hearing the size of the room in which the sound is, 
because both cases are the standing-wave phenomenon).

I'd guess that psychoacoustic experiments are right, if one considers only 
what is heard directly by the ear, but that's disregarding what can be 
heard by the mind (by indirect use of ears).

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada