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

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> 
> >So I think here it is the change in latency that is the more important 
> >factor rather than purely the larger latency.  I think you would also 
> >get a similar experience if you were skilled with a high latency 
> >instrument and you were presented with a low latency version of the same 
> >thing.
> 
> This is because a musician automatically learns to compensate for latency 
> by playing all notes in advance. All musicians do this, but usually having 
> more to do with latency of the muscles and nerves. When the latency is 
> changed, the musician has to retrain to a different compensation delay, 
> and that's more tiresome than not having to retrain.

Being (or having been) a clarinet/sax player myself I don't believe
it's the retraining that's tiresome here. It's the "not being trained
correctly" that's tiring.

Compensating for latency or jitter on instruments like a piano or the
drums means to hit the key or cymbal at a different time, but not to
hit it harder. 

On a wind instrument compensating in theory would only mean to remove
the tongue from the hole or the reed at a different time to make way
for the stream of air coming from your lungs, but there's more to it:

Generating sound on a wind instrument requires a certain air pressure.
Now if the latency a player is used to suddenly gets bigger, it may
feel as if the air pressure generated isn't high enough anymore to
generate a sound immediatly. Unconsiously one may try to raise the
pressure to really force a tone to come out of the instrument, when
all that would really be needed is to remove the tongue at an earlier
time. This also means that the playing in general becomes louder as
happened in IOhannes' case and I'm sure that's what was so exhausting. 

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                 _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__