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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Dec 18, 2006, at 7:51 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> 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).

You can't hear what your ears hear, you can only hear what your mind  
perceives.  The auditory processing parts of the brain do massive  
amounts of processing of the data that comes into the ears,  
discarding a lot of the data, and often waiting for more data before  
reporting the results to the conscious part of your brain.  You can  
directly access your ears no more readily that you can consciously  
control your liver or kidneys.

These phenomenon are very apparent when you try them yourself, and  
most of the time, even if you are fully aware of what the actual  
content of the sound source actually is, you cannot change your  
perception.

If you really want to get deep into it, I recommend Bregman's  
Auditory Scene Analysis.  He's the main guy who has really broken  
down auditory perception into its constituent parts.  Here are some  
examples from that book:

http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/auditory/bregmancd.html

.hc

>
>  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
> | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
> | Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada


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"[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are  
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