Latency

Every ensemble faces the same physical problem: N oscillators with slightly different natural frequencies trying to synchronise through a shared coupling channel. The Kuramoto model — developed by a statistical physicist to describe fireflies, neurons, and power grids — applies directly to musicians. It predicts a phase transition between incoherence and synchrony, quantifies why latency destroys networked ensemble performance, and connects to recent EEG studies of inter-brain synchronisation.

We measured end-to-end audio and video latency for LoLa and MVTP across six European research-network links. One-way audio latency ranged from 7.5 to 22.5 ms. Routing topology mattered more than geographic distance. Enterprise firewalls were a disaster. Here is what we found.