American Scientist

To the Editors:

I was thrilled to learn from Esther M. Morgan-Ellis’s article “Virtual Community Singing During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (January–February) about expanding possibilities for community singing and will spread the good word. I have been joining my synagogue’s Shabbat services via Facebook Live and singing along with our rabbi and the congregation.

Your article raised two questions for me. I am still not clear on how stacking reception and broadcasting on Facebook Live works. Am I correct that two computers are required, one with headphones to receive the feed, the other with a microphone to broadcast?

Also, latency of a matter of microseconds, as stated on page 30, seems much too brief to be of consequence to the human ear. Should that measurement be milliseconds?

Eric Reines
Marblehead, MA

Dr. Morgan-Ellis responds:

First, yes—that measurement should have been in milliseconds. [Editors’ note: The measurement has been corrected in the online version of the article.]

Singing over Facebook Live works best with two devices. I prefer to stream in the other singers using my phone and a Bluetooth speaker with the sound turned way up. Then I broadcast out from my laptop using a microphone that picks up the sound from the other singers and my own singing. The same process can be accomplished using two browser tabs on the same computer, but I had a lot of trouble with that method.

Recently, for whatever reason, I haven’t been able to broadcast over Facebook Live on my computer, so instead I have been playing the stream on my computer and broadcasting using my phone (the opposite of the process described above), which works surprisingly well, even though I don’t have as nice a microphone.