Effects of audio latency in a disc jockey interface

Abstract

This study presents an evaluation of the disturbance caused by audio latency in a DJing task. An experiment was conducted, during which subjects were asked to synchronise one song to a reference song using a common DJ interface. Synchronisation was performed by adjusting the speed of one of the songs to tat of the reference song and time-aligning both songs. Latency was introduced between the interface and the audio output, varying between 0ms and 550 ms. The average synchronisation time was estimated as a function of subjects, Beat-Per-Minute difference between the songs and latency. Results showed that for trained DJs, synchronisation time increased significantly above 130ms of audio latency, whereas for naive subjects, latency had no influence on the synchronisation time. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.