I’m trying to explain this to a friend who wants a group of us to sing together via Zoom, but I’m not doing a great job breaking it down for him. All I understand is that singing together this way won’t work in real-time because of varying connectivity speeds…? I think. TIA for any help.
In: Technology
It really depends on a case by case thing but generally yes, you can expect there will be very slight lags that will desynchronize things. Also sounds quality might drop randomly. So you can always try but manage your expectations.
You can sing in harmony as the pitch is not being affected by the call. However timing is going to be a big issue. Humans can keep talking normally with up to 0.5s delay. But as you probably have experienced on some zoom calls it can sometimes be hard to even keep a dialog at times which is largely due to delays in the sound approaching or even going over 0.5s. And just for reference that is equivalent to a whole beat in a 120 beats per minute song. This makes it hard to sing with others because all of you have to lead the song by that much in order for you all to stay in sync.
Professional musicians are able to do this because they have trained to keep the rhythm and lead the song by exactly as much as they need to. This is because even without having to sing through an Internet connection sound takes some time to travel through air so that when musicians are some distance apart on stage they do experience lag as well. However on a normal stage it is not as bad as with a zoom call, you would need an entire stadium for it to get that bad. So while professional musicians have been able to record albums though phone lines and through the Internet this is a testament to their training and the skill of the producer who is able to tweak their performance rather then something most people should be able to do.
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