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

Hans-Christoph Steiner hans at eds.org
Tue Dec 19 16:33:54 CET 2006


On Dec 19, 2006, at 5:53 AM, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> 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.

Yeah, that does sounds like a very plausible explanation.  It is  
definitely an interesting question, but unfortunately, many of these  
things are hard to test.   Perhaps we can start some Pd patches for  
these tests.  I think this kind of thing would really benefit from  
free software collaborative development.

.hc

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