Remote Rounds

June 11th, 2016
bucket_brigade, ideas, music, tech
If you've ever tried to sing "happy birthday" with someone over the internet, you've seen how the delay keeps people from being able to sing together coherently. Once a delay gets above a few ms our ability to create a synchronous piece of music falls apart. This isn't something we can fix with faster connections: lightspeed delay means if you want 10ms of round trip latency you can't be more than 1000 miles apart, and in the real world things will be slower than this.

Instead of trying to sing at the same time, however, what if we make there be a large fixed delay? Then we can sing rounds! Each person would think they were singing the first part, and hear the other person singing the second part. You do need your delay to be completely consistent, and fully symmetric, but this seems doable. This would probably have to be a native app, since low level control of delay like this isn't something the web lets you handle.

Referenced in: Series Singing

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Mindful posting

It is important, for the preservation of American democracy and maybe the world, that the Democrats take the House and Senate in November.

via Thing of Things September 18, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)