> 10ms is around the human-ear latency, so anything at that level or below
> should be good enough for guitar/drumming

Hi all,

I did some research on this some time ago.

You could check:

The perception of cross-modal simultaneity 

by DJ Levitin, 2000

and 

Musical Effects of Latency 
by Mäki-Patola (as well as some of his other papers on latency)
http://www.jyu.fi/musica/symposium/symposiumin_satoa_2005.pdf#page=83

There are of course many forms of latency, inter-aural (< 5ms), visual to aural, action to aural and so on. Actual numbers in milliseconds are generally obtained in laboratory conditions and are hard to apply in real-world cases.

Different behaviors (or mappings if you like the term) have different perceived latencies. Furthermore, a quiet note in a piano can have a latency of 130ms (from when the key is first depressed until there is sound I believe) and we get away with it.

The most important aspect of the levitin paper is that we have anticipatory mechanisms to compensate for latency. That being said, I've been playing live with Pd latencies (15ms+) for a while and have learnt to live with it and forget about them most of the time (there are limits of course...).

best,

J




***************
Jaime Oliver
www.jaimeoliver.pe
jo2357@columbia.edu
Columbia University






On Jul 27, 2012, at 9:48 AM, Simon Iten wrote:

Well from a musicians point of view (me) everything above 8ms is not very playable.  This is obvioulsy only true if the generated sound has instant attack, otherwise latency does not really matter :-)

On Jul 27, 2012 2:30 PM, "Charles Henry" <czhenry@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 8:50 PM, Tyler Leavitt <thecryoflove@gmail.com> wrote:
> 10ms is around the human-ear latency, so anything at that level or below
> should be good enough for guitar/drumming (this is anectodtal... Iḿ not sure
> the exact science behind it). Ive never had a problem with my friends older
> 13" MacBook Pro used as a guitar FX box.
>
> Tyler

I believe the phenomenon you're describing is called "loudness
integration."  However, I can't find any good citations available on
the internet to back it up--here's something that *might* be
applicable:
Plack, C. J., & Moore, B. C. J. (1990). Temporal window shape as a
function of frequency and level. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, 87, 2178–2187.

The basic idea is that the cochlea is fed a series of waves and a
particular place on the basilar membrane resonates most for a given
frequency.  The instantaneous power delivered is low, so the power
needs to accumulate before the stimulus is strong enough to be
perceived.

As I recall, it takes about 20 ms to reach a steady state, but it's
been a while since I've read anything about it.

Chuck

_______________________________________________
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list
UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
_______________________________________________
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list
UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list