He could hear if a box had a delay about 2-3ms. Quite hard requirements.
https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/30454/how-does-a-p...
Seriously? Even if electricity has a drift velocity of 50% the speed of light, that's still 150,000 meters in 1 ms - how long is this cable???? There must be something else at play.
But that could just be my reading of the thread.
Maybe it's just familiarity but even that feels too simple an explanation
I think it is. Because it has always been like this for anyone since he played the first time. You press the key and (a bit later) music comes. I doubt anyone consciously notice that it is not instant, but your mind notices and adjusts to it.
let's say you're standing a few meters from a metronome and a musician playing to it. If the musician is close to the metronome, you will hear their playing on beat. The further the musician plays from the metronome, the more delay between you hearing the metronome and their playing, unless the musician stands between you and the metronome. When would you notice the delay?
I used to play Dance Dance Revolution quite regularly. One of our controllers had a lag that made it unplayable for most people. But I found my brain adjusting to it extremely quickly, and I think it's because I was accustomed to doing that already during organ playing.
I wonder if actually it's the delays plus reverb we manage to adjust to. I remember playing church organ too, a while back, and I found the delays much easier to get used to than say a 4 or 5 ms delay in a DAW, even though the delay was probably much bigger. It's like it's training + room acoustics that we use to adjust, rather than the raw numbers of the physical delay
For example, at a really large outdoor concert, you might have speakers near the stage, and another set of speakers further back. If you don't add any delay, then the people sitting far back will hear the signal once from the speakers closest to them, and then they will hear it again from the speakers that are further away (by the stage). The effect will sound like an echo.
So you delay the sound coming out of the further back speakers just enough so that as sound arrives from the stage, the speakers further back produce it at the same time.
And it's not just large venues. in small venues, you sometimes cannot cover the whole area evenly with one set of speakers, so you might have small "fill" speakers to deal with coverage gaps.
Also, on a grand piano, the hammer generally strikes before bottoming out, unless you play sufficiently loud, the timing dependent on how loud you’re playing. You have to begin moving your fingers or hands downward into the keys farther in advance when playing quietly, which is a whole thing when your hands are at different volumes. The mass and mechanical advantage of the finger affect the timing and volume, too.
Human hearing is quite extraordinary.
I think a technological solution would exist: A and B hears choirmaster, A and B's sound is sent back to server which syncs it with the choirmasters sound before sending to C, D, E and F. C, D, E and F's sound is sent back to the server which syncs it and sends to G, H, I... etc.
So most people can sing along hearing some of the choir and the latency overall shouldn't be too bad. Scales with log(n) * max(latency)
That is, you hear my "Gently" and join in with "Row," but it's not played back for me until I start singing "Merrily." This could work, but as you can see, it would need some clever delay management.