RE: Ninjam techbabble (was: Chinapainting article)

[Warren Sirota <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

What I've always wondered about Ninjam is how the concept of "measure" is
handled - when I Ninjammed at Kyberfest 06, I just trusted the Force (as
dapperly personified by Rainer). But there was no metronome click, and *I*
certainly didn't provide or receive any indication of what the tempo or
measure was.

So is what's going on that an arbitrary measure length subtly influences 
the
way that everyone plays so that they end up conforming, in one way or
another, to the "hidden tempo" without actually realizing it? Kind of like
having a fixed-length loop recording your playing and looping it, only you
have no idea when it starts or ends before you start playing? (Of course,
the music that we were playing during our set didn't have such a fixed
pulse, and didn't rely on any more traditional notions of "tightness", so 
it
was fine for me to play in a way that made my view of the music sound good,
and trust that it also worked on the other end(s).)