🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <15724@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>, sage@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (David Martosko '91) writes:
> I am assisting a psychology professor of mine in a project with music
> perception and psychoacoustics.  We want to use a Macintosh II system
> to trigger MIDI instruments to play, and then record the response times
> of experiment subjects to various MIDI-induced sounds.  The trick is
> that we want to be able to control things from procedures within a BASIC
> or C program.

David,

Depending on the type of "response times" that you want to measure, you
may need to be VERY careful.  MIDI is far from instantaneous, and in fact
is not even really fast.  Any library you use for MIDI control will also
affect timing, and the timing may vary for different calls to the same
code.  If you use an interpreted Basic, you may once again have a
substantial delay introduced.  Some of these factors can even affect the
reliability/accuracy of relative (vs. absolute) timings.  It is also my
experience that it can be hard to use a subjective impression to tell
whether your system response is "prompt";  It can be hard to estimate the
time between events detectd by different senses (e.g. hearing and touch).

-David
ucsd!telesoft!dar, dar@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu