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Comment by tekstar | Hacker News Reader

15 years ago I played in a band with some friends.

We now all love in different cities. Due to the pandemic and lockdowns we ended up reconnecting and despite the distance we are jamming and working on songs like we never left the drummers basement.

Strongly recommend jamulus.io. It is fast enough to actually jam on music with other players.

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How? The network itself should be 15ms, which is the perceptible edge or reverb. Genuinely heavily interested.

The answer is pretty obvious: by not caring if it is under 500ms delay.

unless you get a Quantum A.I. that can predict seconds into the future... mine just said musk will start a Q.A.I. company with some shady zero-equity A-round disguised as pre-sale. Oh wait that's not my QuantumAI, it's just my tweeter tab.

500 ms?! At 500 ms I can assure you you'll have trouble with normal conversations. You're nowhere near collaborative music playing.

everything on that comment was exaggerated for comedy. But the truth is still the same, you have to accept the network latency. period.

anyone promising faster than light communication could very well be claiming a patent to a perpetual motion machine.

Yes. Transatlantic latency is <100 ms. People in this thread have said that 50 ms is doable for making music. Why are you derailing the conversation?

It is perceptible, but doesn't matter that much in practice. If you're able to achieve the overall latency of around 30ms, you'll be able to play just fine - your mind will quickly adjust to the latency, you just need to listen to your delayed output from the server and disable any local monitoring so you stay synchronized with others.

As a musician I kind of strongly disagree with that. I was never able to adjust to latency above ~8ms. Some people might. I can't. I spent as much effort as necessary to ensure that my setup has low latency.

Of course if you're playing with quantization on, or sequencers, it's not as much of a problem

That always struck me as the solution: pump a click centrally to everyone and then everyone synchronizes to it. You might not be able to monitor but you've "jammed" and actually created music.

That's pretty much what Jamulus does: sound is mixed server-side, so you have a single point of reference (can be click track, can be drummer, can be sequencer...). You can even get a multi-track recording saved on the server so you can then adjust timings and give it a proper mix afterwards.

15 ms is the same as people standing 15 ms * 300 m/s = 4.5 m apart.

You can make music together at this distance (even though it's perceptible).

Hmm… Wonder whether it would improve things to create a virtual environment with point sources actually that distance apart, and model the reverb / echoing you'd get from that, so your brain "intuitively" understands the delay.

The most important thing when you do this is that you don't listen to your local audio signal, you only listen to the mixed signal coming from the server. That puts you in time with everyone else, more or less.

Roundtrip latency was under 30ms, which you definitely feel but your brain can compensate for.

The funny effect overall though is that because you're delayed and everyone else is delayed, you end up sort of waiting for the other player, and they end up waiting for you, so instead of the classic band "everyone speeds up" it's like everyone progressively slows down as the song progresses.

We haven't tried with our drummer actually playing drums, he's just been recording against other parts we provide. I don't think it'll work very well because his acoustic kit will be too loud and he'll hear that as well as the delayed drum sound, which for him will feel like a stuttery mess

> don't listen to your local audio signal, you only listen to the mixed signal coming from the server ... I don't think it'll work very well because his acoustic kit will be too loud

Yes, that sounds right. Whether this sort of approach works depends a lot on whether your instrument is naturally quiet enough that you can just focus on what you hear from the server. People are actually surprisingly good at adjusting to instruments that are "slow to sound"; just like you can bounce a basketball on the beat with a little practice, even though it takes many milliseconds for the ball to hit the ground after leaving your hand, you can learn to play keyboard etc with a similar delay.

Yep!

We had a zoom video going at the same time so we could look at each other. What tripped my brain up the most was if I looked for rhythm cues from the video while playing, even my own video would not be in sync and I would lose the zone where I could play in delayed time and have to restart

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