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Re: Building a rackmount looping computer as an alternative to the Receptor for Mobius



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