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At 02:23 PM 10/17/2005, Per Boysen wrote: >This is interesting: The other day I was discussing latency with one >of my live looping students and this percussionist did not see it as >a problem because "in classical training you must learn to adjust the >general timing of your playing" (to compensate for natural latency in >the big concert hall with audience, different instrument groups and >the director spread out over a large area, thus not hearing an >acoustic sound at the same time). Symphonic musicians have to adjust >for the best timing at the listeners position. Hi Per, that's true for a constant latency that doesn't change. As I said in my previous post, people can detect a latency between their playing and the resulting sound as low as 10ms. But musicians can adapt to this fixed latency and compensate for it, just as your percussionist student manages to do in the concert hall. It might not "feel" as good, but the musician can still play successfully. The difficulty with a non-real time system is it cannot guarantee a constant latency between an event and execution of the corresponding function. There is some variation, or jitter to the latency. For your percussionist, this is like being randomly teleported to a different spot in the hall every time he strikes the drum. How can he adapt to that? If he teleports within a small enough radius, he will be ok. Even the best musician can't notice less than 1ms of latency jitter. But another problem with a non-real-time system is it cannot guarantee a maximum latency. So most things happen around the time he expects, but there is some random probability at any time that something will happen significantly later, and his drum strike that time will be well out of rhythm. He can't adapt to that because it is unpredictable, and he will be annoyed. That's the big issue between real-time electronic musical instruments and non-real-time ones. >But myself, I'm not >good at that. To me all the joy of playing just isn't there when my >instrument sounds later - or earlier - than I'm used to. I've always >used small guitar amps close to me on stage and like to practice >saxophone against a flat glossy painted wall (yellow sounds best... >he, he.... just kidding ;-) I don't like latency afflicted hardware >either, for example the Line-6 POD 1. Yes, I hear you on that. I spent an unhealthy amount of time as a youth trying to be Al DiMeola. My guitar picking technique got very precise, and as a result I seem to have tuned myself very well to hearing these tiny latencies. That's about all I got out it though. In retrospect it seems like I could have done something more interesting with all those hours every day after high school I spent practicing scales. :-) kim ______________________________________________________________________ Kim Flint | Looper's Delight kflint@loopers-delight.com | http://www.loopers-delight.com