How Latency Makes Jamming Together in Real Time Nearly Impossible
How Latency Makes Jamming Together in Real Time Nearly Impossible COVID‑19’s impact on musicians includes everything from canceled tours and gigs to lost teaching and studio opportunities. It’s also affected our ability to get together and rehearse or jam for fun. For many purposes, like work meetings or conversations with friends, “getting together” remotely is as simple as getting dressed and firing up a Zoom call. That’s not true for music‑making – it turns out that even small amounts of latency introduced by the network are a big problem for musicians trying to play together. When shelter-in-place began, my social feeds were flooded with questions from musicians like “Why can I play online video games with 200 people, but I can’t play music with one or two friends?” As both a professional drummer and web developer, I have a unique perspective on [ more… ]
