In this song, which is also chapter four of the movie Interstella 5000 movie (spoilers from here!), the knocked-out singers are scanned, parameterized, brainwashed, uploaded into The Matrix, and then used in the following songs of the movie-album to robotically mass produce music.
It makes perfect sense that the BPM is 123.45 because that’s exactly the sort of thing you get when a manager (who’s shown at the end!) just enters some numbers on the keyboard into the bpm field. They don’t keysmash the numpad; they just hit 123456789 until the field is full!
So not only does the song itself convey what some boss thinks is music, robotically beating at 123.45 bpm, but it is itself about being endlessly-rotating brainwashed-boring cogs in a pop music production industrial machine. I’m pretty sure the movie scene cuts and animations are timed specifically to the beats of the song, but knowing that they’re timed to a machine-specific bpm that a human would never select at random with a metronome?
Absolute genius.
I had no idea. Thanks for posting this.
EDIT: At 123.4567bpm, I think the track has precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song and actually has 456 beats total, which is either numerological nonsense or pure genius by Daft Punk. Math elsethread :)
It surely adds a nice flavor to one of their best songs. There wont be one time when the song is played from now on where I wont proclaim the this specific trivia.
Just tried this in Reaper. It's actually much closer to 123.47
Anyway that album, Discovery, is full of funny bits. Track #11 Veridis Quo sounds like "very disco". Turn those two words around, and you got the album's title.
I imported the .wav track from the CD, manually put the BPM on 123.45, cut the first 21 seconds intro out (easier to sync on the main beat), and from there started dragging the track and adjusting the BPM, so that the first bar of the song and the last bar of the song were still on beat. My findings is that it's somewhere between .47 and .48
Thanks for the reminder of eeggs.com! It still has an Easter egg I found in my printer that I submitted 25 years ago. I wonder how many models of obsolete hardware that site documents...
Not the other way around. And since the timing is only given with millisecond accuracy, the bpm should be rounded to the same number of significant digits:
Huh. Get out your red string and pushpins because this inspired a theory.
So if the correct pair of values there ends up being 445 / 216.27000197, then it'll be:
60 * 445 / 216.27000197 = 123.456789
Or, since one of those programs had four decimals:
60 * 445 / 216.27015788 = 123.4567
Or, if it's 444/446 rather than 445:
60 * 444 / 215.78415752 = 123.4567
60 * 446 / 216.75615823 = 123.4567
But I see that they cut the "whooshing intro" at the front, which I imagine is part of the beat — they're in the hands of the machine now, after all! — so if we retroactively construct 123.4567 bpm into the silence (which, they estimate, is 5.58s):
5.58s * (123.4567bpm / 60s) = 11.4814731 beats
Assuming that the half a beat of slop silence there has to do with format / process limitations with CD track-seeking rather than specific artistic intent, we get:
+11 intervals @ 123.4567 bpm = 5.346s
Which, when added to the original calculation, shows:
And so we end up with a duration of 221.616 seconds between the calculated 'first' beat, a third of a second into the song, and the measured 'last' beat from the post:
60 * 456 / 221.616 = 123.4567 bpm
Or if we use the rounded 123.45 form:
60 * 456 / 221.628 = 123.45 bpm
And while that 22+1.628 is-that-a-golden-ratio duration is interesting and all, the most important part here is that, with 123.4567bpm, I think it's got precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song (the math checks out^^ to three digits compared against the first 'musical beat' at 5.58s!), and so I think there's actually 456 beats in the robotic 123.45 song!
:D
^^ the math, because who doesn't love a parenthetical with a footnote in a red-string diagram (cackles maniacally)
Not sure if it adds anything, but a factoid I know is that CD timing is expressed in minutes, seconds, and frames, where each frame is 1/75th of a second.
I'm not sure but I think this is also the smallest time resolution.
Then each frame is composed of samples, but they seem to be counted in groups of 1/75th os a second anyway.
Almost all electronic music is synced to a sequencer and so obviously is going to have a very steady tempo.
Haha if only
Well the tempo is steady by human standards, but latency and jitter on timing signals are recurring issues in electronic music. Some devices put out very steady timing but don't like being slaved to another device, bugs can creep in at loop points or pattern switching (even on Roland's latest flagship drum machine, which costs most of $3000), things can get messy if there is too much note/controller data and so on.
Very unlikely to be an actual easter egg. This was posted on the (awful) DaftPunk subreddit a while back, and reads just like some hidden advertisement.
I’m not at the computer to check now, but you gotta consider that the music uses a sample from
Cola Bottle Baby that was recorded in analog and most likely had transport drift when plagued in a different equipment. A lightly variation on the nominal speed can cause a fractional BPM.
When that is sampled and speed/slowed in software - specially at the time the record was made, you couldn’t get exact on the beat with a digital metronome.
> But for the time being there remain a few things that humans can do very easily which computers find difficult. Along with counting traffic lights and crosswalks, one of those things is finding the exact BPM of a song. Not an estimate like most software does, but the exact value with extreme precision across the entire song.
I thought BPM detection has been extremely precise for some time now (for electronic music anyway). Does this mean when software like Mixxx reports (for example) 125 BPM the raw output of the algorithm might have been 124.99, but some higher logic replaces it with an even 125?
I'd have to check, but I wonder what pitch the song is in? Could have it just been sped up ever so slightly in mastering, or even just between tape playback from mixing to mastering?
I have to wonder if this is like Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz - viewers can imply all sorts of intent that is very unlikely to have been there originally. A small mistake or tweak in any layer of processing could have easily done this.
Probably. Their final mixing chain is quite interesting too. There's a thread on gearspace that I can't find right now, which details how they record stems into a Roland S760 sampler because it colours the sound in a pleasantly digital way.
For those not familiar "Cola Bottle Baby" is the Edwin Birdsong tune [1] that Daft Punk sampled for "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". I heard the sample first but think I prefer the original at this point (despite the songs being different genres). Lots of interesting stuff going on with the bass guitar and chorus that's missing in the Daft Punk cut.
This is true with many of Daft Punk's tracks imo, when listening to the original and then going back to the Daft Punk version it feels like a downgrade because of missing instruments and structure
No. Sometimes, when the topic or medium require perfect grammar, I translate my comments into english using Gemini. And when I do that sometimes I wonder if it sounds as robotic and toothless as AI generated comments.
Which part of that two line comment made you think it was AI generated?? Are you imagining he did something like this:
prompt> You are a commenter on a popular tech-focused discussion forum. Write a comment about how Daft Punk still surprises us, despite the fact that they're retired. Include a note about how much time has passed since they last performed. Also, include the album name itself. The comment should be brief and mildly enthusiastic. Phrase it in such a way as to attract many upvotes from community members.
chatgpt> Daft Punk continues to awe us, even after their retirement. Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!
---
I swear, the AI Policing around here is getting annoying.
You made it a joke but yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what the original poster did and his comment history backs it up. Edit: I just figured out you're not the same person.
I don't think he does that post by post, btw, I'm pretty sure it's automated.
Either that or he actually writes like 2023 Chat-GPT, which I know it's something that is happening to people.
It happened to me too, started seeing and dreaming of AI zombies and lemmings everywhere but I got over it pretty fast. This was ~1 year ago. I hope it will turn out just fine for you too.
Daft Punk are totally of the smart sort to do this kind of easteregg. They're just a clever band, another fun Daft Punk easter egg, they were in a band with Phoenix called Darlin'.
(Daft Punk got their name from a review of the Darlin' record)
https://youtu.be/gAjR4_CbPpQ
In this song, which is also chapter four of the movie Interstella 5000 movie (spoilers from here!), the knocked-out singers are scanned, parameterized, brainwashed, uploaded into The Matrix, and then used in the following songs of the movie-album to robotically mass produce music.
It makes perfect sense that the BPM is 123.45 because that’s exactly the sort of thing you get when a manager (who’s shown at the end!) just enters some numbers on the keyboard into the bpm field. They don’t keysmash the numpad; they just hit 123456789 until the field is full!
So not only does the song itself convey what some boss thinks is music, robotically beating at 123.45 bpm, but it is itself about being endlessly-rotating brainwashed-boring cogs in a pop music production industrial machine. I’m pretty sure the movie scene cuts and animations are timed specifically to the beats of the song, but knowing that they’re timed to a machine-specific bpm that a human would never select at random with a metronome?
Absolute genius.
I had no idea. Thanks for posting this.
EDIT: At 123.4567bpm, I think the track has precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song and actually has 456 beats total, which is either numerological nonsense or pure genius by Daft Punk. Math elsethread :)
Anyway that album, Discovery, is full of funny bits. Track #11 Veridis Quo sounds like "very disco". Turn those two words around, and you got the album's title.
Also, C418 put a creeper face in Minecraft's soundtrack.
If you're up for it, trade a music rec?
Try:
Scorpion Mother - Thief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A3113EQvLg
Certain Indian music and metal seems to scratch a similar itch for me. And of course orchestra and drum n bass.
There's a better visualization of the track here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHup81lEjqo
So if the correct pair of values there ends up being 445 / 216.27000197, then it'll be:
60 * 445 / 216.27000197 = 123.456789
Or, since one of those programs had four decimals:
60 * 445 / 216.27015788 = 123.4567
Or, if it's 444/446 rather than 445:
60 * 444 / 215.78415752 = 123.4567
60 * 446 / 216.75615823 = 123.4567
But I see that they cut the "whooshing intro" at the front, which I imagine is part of the beat — they're in the hands of the machine now, after all! — so if we retroactively construct 123.4567 bpm into the silence (which, they estimate, is 5.58s):
5.58s * (123.4567bpm / 60s) = 11.4814731 beats
Assuming that the half a beat of slop silence there has to do with format / process limitations with CD track-seeking rather than specific artistic intent, we get:
+11 intervals @ 123.4567 bpm = 5.346s
Which, when added to the original calculation, shows:
60 * (445 + 11) / (3:41.85 - (0.5.58s - 0:5.346s)) = 123.4567 bpm
And so we end up with a duration of 221.616 seconds between the calculated 'first' beat, a third of a second into the song, and the measured 'last' beat from the post:
60 * 456 / 221.616 = 123.4567 bpm
Or if we use the rounded 123.45 form:
60 * 456 / 221.628 = 123.45 bpm
And while that 22+1.628 is-that-a-golden-ratio duration is interesting and all, the most important part here is that, with 123.4567bpm, I think it's got precisely 0.2345 seconds of silence before the first 'beat' of the song (the math checks out^^ to three digits compared against the first 'musical beat' at 5.58s!), and so I think there's actually 456 beats in the robotic 123.45 song!
:D
^^ the math, because who doesn't love a parenthetical with a footnote in a red-string diagram (cackles maniacally)
5.58s - (60 * 11/123.4567) = 0.2339961 ~= 0.234
5.58057179s = 0.23456789 + (60 * 11/123.4567)
I'm not sure but I think this is also the smallest time resolution.
Then each frame is composed of samples, but they seem to be counted in groups of 1/75th os a second anyway.
Haha if only
Well the tempo is steady by human standards, but latency and jitter on timing signals are recurring issues in electronic music. Some devices put out very steady timing but don't like being slaved to another device, bugs can creep in at loop points or pattern switching (even on Roland's latest flagship drum machine, which costs most of $3000), things can get messy if there is too much note/controller data and so on.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/10760494
When that is sampled and speed/slowed in software - specially at the time the record was made, you couldn’t get exact on the beat with a digital metronome.
I thought BPM detection has been extremely precise for some time now (for electronic music anyway). Does this mean when software like Mixxx reports (for example) 125 BPM the raw output of the algorithm might have been 124.99, but some higher logic replaces it with an even 125?
I have to wonder if this is like Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz - viewers can imply all sorts of intent that is very unlikely to have been there originally. A small mistake or tweak in any layer of processing could have easily done this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiD39jo5Yo4
Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!
I don't remember ever doing that in HN, though.
prompt> You are a commenter on a popular tech-focused discussion forum. Write a comment about how Daft Punk still surprises us, despite the fact that they're retired. Include a note about how much time has passed since they last performed. Also, include the album name itself. The comment should be brief and mildly enthusiastic. Phrase it in such a way as to attract many upvotes from community members.
chatgpt> Daft Punk continues to awe us, even after their retirement. Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!
---
I swear, the AI Policing around here is getting annoying.
I don't think he does that post by post, btw, I'm pretty sure it's automated.
Either that or he actually writes like 2023 Chat-GPT, which I know it's something that is happening to people.