On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 20:20:46 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On 12/12/13 19:52, John Colvin wrote:
Delay between people isn't really the problem, it's delay in
hearing yourself
that's the killer.
Think people listening to people they hear with delay for their
musical cues, and the people they are listening to listening to
_them_ for their musical cues, and the feedback effect that
might result ... :-) You have to get used to the fact that the
right time to play may sound like the wrong time to play
relative to some other group spatially separated from you.
I don't doubt it's a problem, but at least in the orchestra or
with acoustic instruments in general you have the luxury of
having hand-ear synchronization. For an electric guitarist in the
studio, you have actual latency between when you feel the pick
strike in your hand and when you hear it in your ears, sometimes
up to 64ms. It's a complete nightmare.
By the same token, if everyone plays precisely with the
conductor, they don't actually play precisely together as far
as the audience is concerned, which is why professional
orchestras tend to play a bit behind the conductor's beat.
An interesting side-effect of this is in recordings of
orchestras. In order to reconstruct the feel of the music from
the audiences* perspective, you actually have to time-delay the
different mics from different sections!
*but where in the audience? Decisions, decisions...
