Academic studies have indicated that jitter becomes noticeable between 1 and 5ms, with a weighting around 2-3ms (Van Noorden 1975, Michon 1964, and Lunney 1974). At extreme levels, jitter makes it impossible to perform at all, but at lower variations of a few milliseconds, everything just feels off and you never connect with the music you’re playing, without really being able to tell why. Jitter on the other hand describes a deviation from a steady signal and makes evenly spaced events come out scattered.Ĭontrary to latency, jitter is very disconcerting for a musician as it’s not constant and the timing of sound unpredictably changes from event to event: sometimes a note might be heard almost immediately but at other times it’s heard with a varying delay that can’t be anticipated. Pipe organists are possibly the most extreme example of our capacity to deal with latency, due to delays of up to hundreds of milliseconds caused by the physics of the pipes and the spaces they’re played in. Hence, anybody that plays in a band naturally compensates for latency, resulting from the different positions of other band members on stage or in the rehearsal room. The simple fact that audio transits through air introduces latency. Interestingly, musicians are extremely good at dealing with latency because it’s predictable and already present all around us. Latency is a short constant delay that is introduced between the occurrence of an event and the actual perception of the audio. Most timing aspects of electronic music can be described through latency and jitter. Let’s first get some basic terminology out of the way. I never had time to analyze why exactly, until research I did last week revealed a critical lack of MIDI time-stamping support in most plugin hosts and DAWs. I always used to feel very disconnected from the musical performance and with my new setup this wasn’t as much the case anymore. One of the things that struck me over other solutions was that software synths felt much nicer to play. For various reasons I ended up using our own Eigenharp software, EigenD, even though I never intended to. A few months ago I set out to replace my MIDI guitar performance environment with a more flexible and intuitive solution.
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