This is thematically amazing when you consider what the song is about — the roboticization of the abducted band. (Music video:)

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 :)

With all the talk about "does the software support fractional bpm" wouldn't you just create it at say 124bpm and then scale down to 123.45 (or whatever) by taking the total length and scaling it by that percentage (e.g. 0.99561926612903225806451612903226). You don't even need to scale it trying to keep the pitch correct. You just speed it up < half a percent, the pitch rises slightly, and you have your perfect bpm.

I am not convinced that it is really 123.45 BPM, more like 123.48

Reasons are:

- Someone here commented that Reaper gives 123.47 BPM

- I implemented my own BPM finder back in the days, which is quite accurate with electronic music that doesn't change tempo, dug it out, and got a result of 123.48 BPM

- I looked for files for rhythm games, and I found this https://osu.ri.mk/beatmapset/1495670 with a listed BPM of 123.48

If you want precise BPM, I suggest looking at rhythm games (DDR/ITG stepcharts, OSU beatmaps, etc...). People playing these games really want tight timing, in the order of 10 ms or less, it means that a difference of 0.01 BPM matters. For top players, a difference of 0.03 BPM would be completely off after a couple of minutes.

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.

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.

Daft Punk are very clever in the way they make their music. Their song "One More Time" is a simple three-part sample from a 70s disco song. This video is a great visualization on how it's composed. Absolutely incredible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI

Thinking back to when Aphex Twin encoded his face into a track: https://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10

> The year is 1999 or 2000. Would the gear Daft Punk uses even support fractional BPMs? And if so out to how many decimal places?

Do not assume that because a particular gear prints out a particular BPM value that the actual BPM is that. Plenty of midi gear is inaccurate.

There's a minor issue with the calculations. It should be:

    60 * 445 / 216.276 = 123.453365145
    
    60 * 445 / 216.282 = 123.449940356

    60 * 445 / 216.276 = 123.453
    
    60 * 445 / 216.282 = 123.450

Daft Punk was cooking up next level stuff in Discovery. Face to Face's sample breakdown still blows my mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd7zDp35zBI

Here's John's Reddit post about his discovery, which he deleted for some reason:

https://old.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/1phvika/did_i_jus...

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" was built around a one- or two-bar loop sampled from Edwin Birdsong's "Cola Bottle Baby."

Daft Punk determined that this loop had a tempo of 116.527 BPM and played it a semitone higher.

116,527 * 2 ^ (1 / 12) = 123,456 BPM

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.

having a daft punk themed morning, was just looking at this old answer on SO

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10760494

“ Computers have a rough time of this because they don’t really know how to “keep a beat”, and the algorithms that can find the beat do a lot better when they already know the estimated BPM, which is obviously a chicken/egg problem.”

Incredible! Would love some science on this.

Seems most likely they used an analog trick, like Varispeed, on the final mix (old Beatles trick from the 60s).

Daft Punk is one of my favorite artists ever but I am not familiar with all their discography(my shame and I mean to remedy that). But this was such a cool read from an obvious bigger fan than me. Half way through was only when I realized the significance of a BPM of 123.45, I didn't read it out without the decimal until then lol. And so many more fans in the comments, wow.

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.

I listened to this song a day ago, freaky coincidence.

Even if the software didn't support it, they could just make the song at 123 BPM and speed it up a tiny bit before releasing it.

Is the tempo continuous? It's also possible the tempo just shifts between 123.4 and 123.5 to average out to 123.45

My supplemental question would be: what BPM is Cola Bottle Baby?

On a different but related note, the best version of this song is by Scary Pockets;

https://youtu.be/RHu0ALxqUIo?si=39AqMuSrLL2zu3At

> 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?

Daft Punk if you're reading this please go on tour. We only have a few years before the robots take over for real...

Most likely a coincidence, but the article and this thread are so cool I hope they never confirm or deny.

Daft Punk continues to awe us, even after their retirement.

Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!

Good Luck Babe by Chappell Roan has a chorus that is 1 bpm slower than the verse!

This band really appealed to gen x and early millennial for some reason.

Put words where they don't exist.

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.

Year of robot showmanship?

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)

Tell me when we can get realtime stem splitting!

[flagged]