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Comment by kfarr | Hacker News Reader

Bingo this is the answer. You can't "speed up" the speed of light, but you can have predetermined latency with a synchronized clock that lets you do lots of great things.

Other ideas (this is not new btw), you don't get to hear the other participants but you're all on the same sync'ed clock with a metronome and trust the general output will be ok. Final mix is synced to viewers (obviously on delay to achieve sync).

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Most studio recordings are done iteratively, where you record a rough "scratch" track but then one by one, record over each part so that the final recording is the sum of everyone playing their best. This combines the feeling of playing with a group asynchronously with producing a high-quality recording. Would be cool to see tools to make this easier although the current gen of DAWs is pretty good.

It's worth watching some interviews with artist like Jack White to get their take on the quantization of music like this. It's not always the best way to make a track. And then when you get o concert If the artists can't bring it on stage then it's a bit of a letdown.

would love a link to such an interview if you have a particular one in mind

I wonder if this is why older music often sounds so much more pleasant and relaxed. Not recorded with a click track?

Latency is the most crucial issue for audio when doing live broadcasts, especially when the peers all need to be synchronized to a rhythm or pulse.

However, it doesn't stop there. Latency is also important for voice, not just music; excess latency is also the cause of the dreaded zoom fatigue [0].

We humans seem to have brains designed for particular cadences of conversation, and products like Zoom really work to disrupt & disengage these preferences we have, leading to poor communications outcomes.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-does-zoom-exhaust-you-scien...

I wonder if over time, we will learn to adapt to the new cadence as we continue to socialize over platforms like zoom. My hunch is that we will, it will just take time for our minds to adapt to the new medium.

I'm not so sure.

We'll likely fix the latency issues inherent to the way we do live broadcasting on the web today before the human race has the time needed to adapt to the new cadence.

Our vocal communication was solidified into our genetic code over millions of years of iteration. I imagine that in a decade or less, the latency issue will be fixed for most of the connected world.

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