TIME PERCEPTION and LOOPING

["RICK WALKER" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

I've been avidly following discussions of the relative latency of
various soundcard/laptop configurations and have also been
a serious practical student of different  feels and approaches to
time in rhythmic and phrase performance,    from experimenting a lot
with various methods of playing behind and ahead of the beat
when playing with metronomes, sequencers or even human beings
to trying to be able to fill the smallest intervals of time with all the 
polyrhythms
from 1 - 12 for odd time, polyrhthm and rhythmic stretching concepts.

Years ago I remember reading that human beings cannot distinquish between
hearing a transient sound that is less than 20 or 30 milliseconds but I've 
heard
discussions of people claiming to be sensitive to the difference between
2 and 5 milliseconds with regard to latency issues between remore keyboards
and laptops.

It got me to thinking that I haven't really read any Western causal 
studies 
of
time perception since I studied with Gregory Bateson back in 1975 so
I got on the computer and started googling to see what I could find.

1)   I came up with a really interesting lay article on time and time 
perception
http://www.skidmore.edu/~hfoley/Time.htm   that may interest people
and I would be fascinated to hear from anyone who knows about this subject
and can direct me to good written or online resources so that I can come up
to speed on what's been going on in time perception in the last 30 years.

2)  I wonder if , not unlike   wattage specifications in tube amps in the 
60s
that varied wildly (Macintosh was notoriously conservative,  many of the
Japanese amplifier manufacturers obviously inflated their wattage 
statistics),
that claims of low latency by different manufacturers are frequently not
accurate at all.      As an example,  M-Audio boasts of very low latency 
values
(but oddly enough they don't print what they are on their website that I 
can 
find)
but I'm definitely experiencing considerable performance altering latency 
when
I use it on my desktop PC (that'll be the subject of another thread 
because 
I realize there
are many different reasons why I may be experiencing that.).

Sooooooo,    what about the perception of time?      as it relates to live 
looping.
Read that article which is only a page long and we'll have a lot to 
discuss 
I think.

cheers,  Rick