GuitarHero/RockBand fans... side project anyone?

[Manu]

On 13 December 2013 03:43, Joseph Rushton Wakeling <
joseph.wakeling at webdrake.net> wrote:

> On 12/12/13 16:47, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>
>> Instead I had to time the screen to get any points.
>>
>
> Not defending Guitar Hero here, but sometimes it is necessary to follow
> visual rather than sonic cues in performance -- e.g. the brass players and
> others at the back of a symphony orchestra will often play ahead of
> musicians at the very front, because the sound takes longer to get from
> them to the audience.  There's a lot of subtle internal stuff that goes on
> with different sections of the orchestra having to react and play
> differently in order to keep the whole together, and a lot of that needs to
> be be modulated by following visual cues of one kind or another from
> various different people, sometimes against the grain of what your ears are
> getting.
>

Hey that's a really interesting thought actually. I never considered that.
I suppose this would only be applicable in a large auditorium though?
I have a whole new appreciation for the conductor upon that revelation
alone! :)
Modern music has a conveniently placed foldback speaker, or even in-ear
monitor... you all hear each other at the same time, it's easy enough to
synchronise.

Then there are things like some extreme contemporary music where different
> musicians are effectively in different tempi -- you can play with a
> click-track, but sometimes it's easier or preferable to have flashing
> lights give you your own personal tempo.
>
> Plugged-in performance isn't really my area, but it wouldn't surprise me
> if having to deal with latency is an occasional occupational challenge
> there -- can anyone confirm? :-)
>

Plugged in performance still uses low-tech analog technology, specifically
to eliminate latency. Modern recording hardware has an element of wrangling
latency, although that was more of a problem 5-10 years ago than it is now.
At all comes from the switch to digital technology, where you need to start
buffering blocks of audio, and performing burst transmissions. That's where
latency really starts creeping into the system.
Certainly prevalent in GH, which is running on cheap consumer hardware,
which isn't really even designed for true low-latency gameplay (not to the
standards a good musician expects).
The work-around is a bunch of in-game knobs to specify latency offsets for
various outputs (video/audio), against the input
(controllers/keyboard/midi) which may also have its own latency.
People need to properly understand the problem before they can configure
these knobs properly, and most general players just don't even bother, they
play right off the screen and ignore the music.
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