Any digital instrument also has latencies. Basically it is a matter of
playing the instrument you are using.
How are you measuring the latency?
with a digital instrument, in this context, it has to be from the time the
gesture is made that controls the effect, till the effect is heard by the
listener, and separately till the effect is heard by the musician.
so the 15 or 20 ms of DSP processing latency is only one part of that... then
add such things as input latency (say midi or the audio input circuitry, or the
distance from source to microphone ...) output latency (say distance from the
reproduced sound source to the ears).
then consider the response time involved in detecting the gestures, like in the
recent thread here (or LAU?) talking about tracking following notes played on a
guitar and using meta data based on that.
then consider the difference between judging the effect as heard by a listener
compared to what is heard by the musician (re timing in this case, but generally
these is a very substantially different sounds in any wood, flesh and metal
instruments ... what a singer hears unless they are wearing headsets is very
different indeed to what anyone else listening hears)
then consider the time between the start of a sound and its main attack, the
time read as the timing of the note.
as pointed out earlier in the thread much western orchestral music is not
tightly timed rhythmically, but there are many other very old musical traditions
that are very percussive, with very intricate timings that deal with significant
distances between players or with instruments like big gongs or bells that have
huge latencies built in.
in very many circumstances, now and historically, 20 ms here or there is tiny,
as long as it is consistent ... jitter (generally) is unplayable.
in the particular circumstance of a musician whose experience is limited to
playing with headsets or close monitors getting fed a mix of the final sound
sent to the listener ... most of those normal latencies have been bypassed and
the digital world has made that kind of performance much, much easier for modern
musicians (those playing with that kind of technological assistance) ... then 15
ms can become very significant ... best for them to avoid big gongs, plus any
digital effect that requires taking latency into account when playing.
Simon
_______________________________________________
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list
UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management ->
http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
