On Dec 18, 2006, at 1:16 PM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
On Dec 18, 2006, at 4:59 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
he gradually became louder in order to minimize the latency (with physical wind instruments this helps), and after 1 hour of playing he almost collapsed (ok, that's a bit exaggerated)
I don't doubt that it was fatiguing to play that instrument. But do you have any specific data that shows that the latency was the source of the problem? My guess is that the reduction of feedback is essential part of this. I think that a system with so little feedback will be fatiguing to play no matter how low the latency.
he is used to play his MIDI wind-controller for years.
he kept complaining about the (increased) latency during all rehearsals.
i have no reason to believe that he lied to me, when he said he had seriously more problems on the system which added more latency.
probably he was just in the "superhuman mode", but honestly i doubt this.
64k are still enough..
Ah ok, that explains it. So he was used to the MIDI wind controller, and you presented him with a different one, with different latency. This is the case of the skilled musician sensitive to subtle differences that I mentioned in the beginning of this discussion. 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.
Believe me, I am not saying that you shouldn't be working on developing lower latency hardware and software. I think that is valuable research. What I have a problem with is the common belief that if your system has more than 10ms of latency, its unusable as a real instrument. That is just plainly untrue, and many physical, traditional instruments have much larger latencies, violin being a good example.
So if you are interested in the question of how to create low-latency systems, like many here are, please continue to work on that. But if you are interested in making music, stop worrying about latency and learn to play your instrument. Unless you have a really crappy sound card like my ooold Thinkpad. It had 850ms of latency, so yeah, that was limiting. :)
.hc
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