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:

On Apologizing To Kids

Everyone is so weird about apologizing to children.

via Thing of Things August 25, 2025

Against the Teapot Hold in Contra Dancing

The teapot hold is the most dangerous common contra dancing figure, so I’ve been avoiding it. The teapot hold, sometimes called a "courtesy turn hold,” requires one dancer to connect with their hand behind their back. When I realized I could avoid put…

via Emma Azelborn August 25, 2025

Little Puppy

She's very little and she likes to do stuff with me. She also likes to bark around and run around and jump around. She also likes to go to places with me and that's all I have.

via Nora Wise's Blog Posts August 23, 2025

more     (via openring)