Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? | Hacker News Reader

Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

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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 :)

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.

Oh dear lord.

Hey! Some of us like when people rattle off niche trivia like that in a club setting.

The record was released way before the movie, so no this is not the song's theme.

Urm, the release date of the movie is not actually an indicator wherever what he said was true or not.

It's more then likely the backstory he outlined, which is I believe a minor subplot non-essential to the main story of the movie - has been added like this precisely because that was the theme of the song.

Because this was actually made by humans, they frequently talk with each other when making art in collaboration

This particular sequence in the movie (which is actually named Interstella 5555) is one of the most important ones in the plot.

Discovery has been explained many times by DP to be about childhood, not having any specific "theme" besides mixing disco and rock. Hence the name "disco very" and the "pun" in Veridis Quo. (which also happens to be a major sequence in the movie. Although DP never cared to enter the details of that particular composition, most likely memory hole'd by the protagonists.)

So no, this is definitely not the theme of the song. There are several years between the actual songwriting and the release of the movie. Heck, if you actually see the movie, the ending sequence kinda explains that this is "one" of many interpretations of the record...

Taking a look at past interviews, it is more likely that 5555 is about what surrounded the actual release of Discovery (hugely anticipated sequel to a magnum opus that was wildly different from expectations) rather than an idea that was here from the start; see also Human After All for a continuation on this theme.

Aw :(

> the "pun" in Veridis Quo

I can't believe I've only just learned about this

Are you sure about that? The music video was the scenes from the movie.

The impression I got as a Daft Punk fan in the 90s was that the movie was commissioned alongside the production of the album and not an afterthought.

The album was released after a couple of singles (iirc) but that’s very typical for artists to do. So it would make sense for the movie to also be released after the singles, even though it was already (mostly) completed.

Edit: seems my memory is largely correct. The movie was always a planned part of the album.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstella_5555:_The_5tory_of...

That's not what the Wikipedia page says and it's not even sourced.

Production of the movie started right at the end of the lengthy recording sessions (reminder that Discovery started being a thing late into the Homework recording sessions, with Short Circuit & One More Time being early productions) but it's rather uncertain how this process started. The one thing that I'm 100% sure of, is that the entire production was funded by DP themselves, and they are probably the only owners of the golden master of the movie. (Hence their media team's fault about the absolutely crappy 4K remaster and noise around it, that led to that awful Epic collaboration).

Singles were released at rather odd intervals for Discovery in particular (according to Bangalter, all songs were conceived as potential singles) and music videos were released after the singles.

EDIT : To be honest, it's a bit tricky to be 100% sure about the actual process, with most of the claims being unsourced random internet shenanigans, and the tendency of some people (hi Pedro) to rewrite history whenever they wish.

I can’t speak for where you’re based, but in the UK the music videos for the singles were aired when the singles were charting and before the albums commercial release.

There is no way the anime and the movie wasn’t part of the original albums concept and neither the part you quoted nor the link I shared disagrees with that point.

I agree the album is an album of singles. But that was never in dispute.

I also deliberately avoided discussing the themes of the songs and plot of the movie but musicians are frequently reinventing meanings to songs. And if the history of operatic movies has anything to go by, it’s that musicians seldom have a coherent plot for these things (regardless of whether you’re Philip Glass or The Who) so it’s usually better to just enjoy the randomness of these movies for what it is. But that doesn’t mean that the anime wasn’t still part of the original album concept.

One More Time was seemingly released in October 2000 and is the only single that was released before the record (not taking in account the leaks).

The earliest copies of music videos being sent to stations are dated from around February 2001.

Discovery was released in March 2001.

The first single bundled with a music video was the fourth one and was released in October 2001.

The earliest broadcast of the four initial videos seems to be August 2001.

So no, music videos and single releases were not really bundled together.

If I understand your dates correctly, Aug 2001 to Oct 2001, that’s only 3 months. Which is far short of the time you’d expect an artist to need to start a movie project entire from scratch if it weren’t already part of the concept of the album.

Those dates could more easily be explained as delays in the animation process.

I’m feeling unwell though, so apologies in advance if I have completely misread and misunderstood your post.

> 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!

This seems like quite an assumption. Why wouldn't they keysmash? Or make up a fake number? And why bother to add a decimal point? What is meant by "robotically beating at 123.45 bpm"? Any fixed tempo beats robotically.

Your theory could be correct but it feels like connecting too many dots to me. 123.45 is a bizarre (and kind of human in that way) tempo that strikes me as more of a cheeky easter egg than a deeper connection to themes of corporate mass-produced roboticism (if they even did intend that as the exact tempo).

I have no counter argument prepared, but I thoroughly enjoyed exploring this all and making plausibly charming numbers. Most likely I’m wrong, of course; that’s an automatic likelihood for any numerology.

I’d say this whole thread is a counter argument. ;)

Couldn’t resist the dad joke. In any case I was enjoying you enjoying DP

> What is meant by "robotically beating at 123.45 bpm"? Any fixed tempo beats robotically.

While a robot can keep beat at 123, most humans can’t keep 123.45. Art doesn’t have to make logical sense.

> While a robot can keep beat at 123, most humans can’t keep 123.45.

Isn’t it also true that while a robot can keep beat at 123.45, most humans can’t keep 123?

Apart from training, there isn’t anything that links human biology and psychology with the length of a second, is there?

Kinda ish. Healthy resting heartbeat is around 60bpm and comfortable exertion heart rate - like doing an indefinitely sustainable run, the kind of thing we evolved to do to run down prey - around double that. The most broadly popular styles of dance music tend to float around 120bpm. It just feels natural to humans. At a guess, some combination of biomechanics (muscle twitch speed, pendulum effect of limb sizes against their articulating joints), heart beat, what most people can manage in terms of sustained exercise (as mentioned above), and attention span linked to multiples of musical phrases.

Specifically about keeping tempo, human drummers don't really. They will move around a central tempo, slowing in verses and increasing tempo in choruses and as the song progresses. If you're hearing a fixed tempo in a song, it's because it was recorded with a click track in the drummer's ear. Super common these days because popular tastes for recorded music currently skew towards perfection.

how many times we saw the password "admin1234" or "1234" ?

> And why bother to add a decimal point?

Perhaps they wouldn't need to? iirc Modern MPC you can enter 12345 on the BPM touch entry field and it will fill that in as 123.45

TFA mentions that some sequencers at the time did not support generating at more than one decimal place

It's unlikely (but not impossible) that Logic would take 12345 input and insert the decimal automatically. The point was that adding the decimal point may not be necessary, especially in software with specific constraints; all sequencers I've come across have BPM ranges (typically 30-300) it's not too much of a stretch to think they could try to "intelligently" convert something that out of range rather than just clamping.

how about the track was 123 and they squeezed it to be within certain length, which defnitely would bring the BPM a little higher?

And they accidentally made it 1.003713731707 times faster? They chose a number that contains only the digits 0, 1, 3, and 7? C'mon, this cannot be a coincidence!!!

It's a good thing we're jumping to conclusions instead of exhaustively evaluating all of the places values exactly like this one appear when dealing with swing and quantization on, and especially when mixing 8, 12, 16 bit samplers and sequencers. Nevermind all of the little nudges from byte window mismatches when reading, playing back, or manipulating samples at varying bit depths and sample rates.

> It’s a good thing we’re all jumping to conclusions

I wholeheartedly agree. This thread would have been a lot less fun to create if I’d had to apply rigorous methodology and proper hypothesis evaluation practices. I’m really glad someone else appreciated that too :D

The whole song is effectively a remix of "Cola Bottle Baby" by Edwin Birdsong.

Compared to Cola Bottle Baby it’s harder, better, faster, and some would even say stronger.

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.

Did you mark or like did a FFT of some sort?

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

that part you bit off could account for the difference?

That would be about 160 ppm off, more than I'd expect if the track was recorded digitally and set to 123.45

I’ve listened to this album so many times and cannot believe I’ve never noticed Veridis Quo is literally Very Disco.

in verlan, Discovery is pronounced “verydisco”

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.

Usually top electronic studios use external clock sync device which prevents that kind of issues, I’m sure that Daft Punk uses it too

Probably not on this album.

Why not? It’s a common equipment and it’s not count as "digital device forbidden in analog studio" as you connect synth directly to it, just to make sure that your front waves are in sync

First, it's not that common. These are specialized tools you won't find in every producers tool belt. Not everyone cares that much about midi clock accuracy or many people will just circumvent the problem. Also, like homework, Discovery is very much a homestudio album, recorded at Bangalter's place. That's not what "top electronic studios" are. Ultimately we don't know and this whole thread is like seeing pictures in clouds to me.

Actually, it is very common - the DAW is usually used as the master clock to external devices such as drum machines, sequencers and synths with onboard arpeggiators/sequencers, and the DAW is itself commonly synced to the high end clocks in a decent quality audio interface, which do not have as much jitter these days as most folks seem to think. Even in the 90’s, this was a feature of many audio interface and DAW rigs. Bangalter was not known for having cheap gear.

> audio interface, which do not have as much jitter these days

But it's not about audio jitter.

Anyway, like I said, too much speculation in this thread.

It’s about MIDI jitter, and if the MIDI clock is locked to the audio clock, its going to be pretty darn good.

That's a big "if". And then there is the jitter induced by the gear receiving the clock. Many drum machines are bad there. See https://innerclocksystems.com/litmus/

It’s really not a big if, it’s currently an actual reality of modern audio interface/DAW configurations. Very few modern audio interfaces do not have MID clock very tightly bound to their audio clock, which is the master clock with far greater accuracy, anyway.

Yes, MIDI jitter can be compounded on the receiving end - but having a very tightly bound MIDI clock to the audio clock can negate a lot of those issues upstream in the first place, and that is precisely why you get a good audio interface that does this anyway.

(Disclaimer: have worked in pro audio product development for decades, have written drivers for exactly this use-case, and I have personally been in the trenches to fight the myths about Audio and MIDI jitter as a developer for a long time now..)

More than likely they did, sync boxes have been around for a long time, they're not that expensive (would have been in the hundreds of dollars or euro at the time), and Daft Punk could surely have bought or borrowed one if they wanted. I was just having a chuckle at the blog author's idealism about how well sync works in the real world. If they were using MIDI, the standard allows for a 1% timing variance at the hardware level (not 1% of 1 beat, 1% of the tempo). I would guess Daft Punk were more likely using old 'classic' synths with control voltage, which is often a bit more reliable.

Yeah, it's a really bold claim by someone who obviously never had to sync midi gear, which can become a nightmare depending on the gear. The problem is so difficult that we have specialized expensive sync gear that try to tackle it.

You mean a protocol designed for 9600 baud has issues with saturation?

The protocol has its limits (heavy polyphony + midi CCs over 16 channels on a serial protocol at 9600 baud is "fun") but some hardware make it way worse than it should be.

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.

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

And Venetian Snares encoded his cat https://eeggs.com/items/46956.html

And Benn encoded a bird into birdsong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo

And Disasterpeace encoded a puzzle in the Fez soundtrack: https://blog.krzyhau.pl/fez-spectrograms-adventure (and nobody has solved it in over a decade!)

Also, C418 put a creeper face in Minecraft's soundtrack.

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...

Into the final track of an album titled "Songs About My Cats", titled "Look". :3

There's a better visualization of the track here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHup81lEjqo

It shouldn't be surprising to see people who know Venetian Snares on here!

If you're up for it, trade a music rec?

Try:

Scorpion Mother - Thief https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A3113EQvLg

I found Venetian Snares last year and one of their songs made my year-in-review: https://wonger.dev/posts/2025#music

Certain Indian music and metal seems to scratch a similar itch for me. And of course orchestra and drum n bass.

huh that's some pretty decent gothy noises

it's worth noting that the parent commenter's link includes a good render of this easter egg in the article as well (it's the last one on the page)

I did silly things like this as teenager too. Always thought it would be a nice way to hide secret messages on an open signal.

Reminded me of this video covering his use of Metasynth and other obscure software in early tracks on yt https://youtu.be/5wIOBBodoic

Mick Gordon hid satanic symbols in the DOOM 2016 soundtrack.

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

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

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:

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

So, it's the YouTube version that's 123.45 bpm to within the rounding error.

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:

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!

^^ 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)

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.

That's only relevant for navigation from the TOC. The samples are always 22.68us apart. That is the finest resolvable timing difference.

I was also wondering about the inherent resolution for the BPM precision claims.

Besides the sample period, the total number of samples matter for frequency resolution (aka BPM precision).

44100 Hz sampling frequency (22.675737 us period) for 216.276 s is 9537772 samples (rounding to nearest integer). This gives frequency samples with a bandsize of 0.0046237213 Hz which is 0.27742328 BPM.

Any claim of a BPM more precise than about 0.3 BPM is "creative interpretation".

And this is a minimum precision. Peaks in real-world spectra have width which further reduces the precision of their location.

Edit to add:

https://0x0.st/Pos0.png

This takes my flac rip of the CD and simply uses the full song waveform. This artificially increases frequency precision by a little compared to taking only the time span where beats are occurring.

This is plainly false though. You're saying beats can't be localized to less than one second of precision (regardless of track length, which already smells suspect). Humans can localize a beat to within 50ms.

Yes, I got lost in the numbers and made a blunder by misinterpreting what we mean by frequency resolution expressed in "BPM" instead of Hz.

It is correct to say "0.0046237213 Hz which is 0.27742328 BPM". My mistake was to interpret 0.27742328 BPM as the limit of frequency resolution in units of BPM. Rather, any BPM measured must be an exact multiple of 0.27742328 BPM.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake!

> (regardless of track length, which already smells suspect)

Frequency resolution being dependent on the number of samples is a very well known property of basic sampling theory and signal analysis.

In fact, one can interpolate the frequency spectrum by zero-padding the time samples. This increases the resolution in an artificial way because it is after all an interpolation. However, a longer song has more natural frequency resolution than a shorter song.

Note, this frequency resolution is not related to fidelity which is some messy human related thing that is over a sliding window of shorter duration that I don't pretend to understand.

BTW, the opposite is also possible. You can zero-pad the spectrum as a means of resampling (interpolating) the time domain. This is slower but more spectrally correct than say time-domain linear or cubic interpolation.

These techniques require an FFT and so are somewhat expensive to apply to long signals like an entire song, as I did for the plot. Daft Punk's HBFS takes about 8 seconds on one CPU core with Numpy's FFT.

Thanks for catching that. The durations were reversed but the BPMs were correct. Updated!

> And to confuse matters more, in a 2013 interview with Time Magazine, Bangalter says:

> > So we've never actually made music with computers! [laughs] Neither Homework nor Discovery nor even Human After All were made with computers.

> Was he contradicting himself from 12 years before? Or did he forget? Or maybe it's a terminology thing?

The thing is—and this is coming from someone who has been making electronic dance music daily for over 35 years and counting—when Bangalter spoke earlier in their career about a PC (likely an Atari ST or Falcon) it was being used as a MIDI / SMPTE timepiece and master sequencer, nothing more. Later when he speaks about never making music with a computer, the context of the discussion has changed, as by that time computers were becoming more accomplished at DSP. The comment he is making is that they didn't use computers for audio domain tasks, like Pro Tools, Digital Audio Workstation type action.

That said, computers were still deeply embedded in their workflow just not in the way most modern producers would recognize. Even the SSL 9000 J console at the heart of their studio relied on an onboard computer system for total recall, automation, and channel configuration. The distinction Bangalter draws is really about where the actual audio lived: in 12-bit sampler memory, on tape and through analog audio circuits, not as samples and waveforms being crunched inside a CPU. The computer was a conductor, not a performer.

PS: All of this got me thinking about the past and dislodged a bunch of memories from my old crusty techno battered brain. In that early interview where Bangalter loosely mentions their production setup: an E-mu SP-1200, an MPC3000, and "Logic on a PC." He doesn't specify what kind of PC, and he doesn't say who made the software—just the word "Logic." One thing is for sure he wasn't talking about an Apple computer or software product.

I was working in studios around Europe in the late '90s and if you said "Logic" in a studio context, you were certainly talking about Emagic Logic, and "PC" didn't mean a Windows box. In that era, particularly in France, "PC" was often used colloquially to mean any Atari ST or Falcon, which had been the backbone of European electronic music production for a decade. Given Daft Punk's roots in the French house scene and the timing of Homework's production (1996-97), there's a strong chance they were running Emagic Logic on Atari hardware, because at the time, the ports of this program to other platforms were garbage and were not to be trusted.

The lineage of the software is an entire saga unto itself. What became Apple Logic started life as C-Lab Notator on the Atari ST in the late '80s which dominated Euro electronic music. In late 1992, after a dispute with C-Lab's owners, the core developers, one of whom was Apple's own Gerhard Lengeling, walked out and founded Emagic. They rewrote everything from scratch as Notator Logic, which eventually dropped the Notator prefix and just became Logic.

Around '02, Apple came knocking and swallowed the whole operation. They immediately killed the Windows version, and dropped the Emagic branding entirely with Logic Pro 7. Like I said, Gerhard Lengeling is still at Apple, now their 'Senior Director of Software Engineering for Musical Applications' according to his LinkedIn.

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

> 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.

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

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’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.

Yes, I am thinking this is mostly just a coincidence.

"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

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...

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

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10760494

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

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.

“ 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.

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.

It’s important for electronic music to have consistent and predictable pitch, otherwise djs on stage will have hard time to play (they loop a start of the song and play it together with tail loop of previous song), so Daft Punk need to intentionally choose fractional BPM as mastering engineers will not change pitch even slightly

DJs routinely change the playback speed to match tempos.

It’s easier if a track’s tempo stays the same throughout its duration, but even if it changes, DJs will adjust the playback speed on the fly.

As far as syncing is concerned, the actual value of the tempos doesn't matter at all.

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?

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiD39jo5Yo4

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

I count it at 116 bpm. Nice and funky, just like mama liked it.

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...

> please go on tour

he blew up

Not happening, that's basically the reason they broke up. To quote Thomas Bangalter:

> As much as I love this character, the last thing I would want to be, in the world we live in, in 2023, is a robot.

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

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

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

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)

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

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.

It's really a stretch for the article to suggest their gear might not have supported fractional bpm. MIDI itself has always supported it and analog sequencers before that support it even easier. Not to mention external clock sync has been a thing for decades.

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.

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

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

It's funny how perspective reveals the fallacy of coincidence.

To you, it seems an uncanny coincidence. To me, it seems someone heard the song and then saw this post.

Given all the people who see this post, I am not surprised one of them heard that song recently.

It’s not a fallacy to call that a coincidence. The point of coincidences are that they’re unconnected events.

So, perhaps ironically, it would be more of a fallacy to say this wasn’t a coincidence.

However you are right that coincidences are easy to manufacture through volume of samples.

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.

An ad for what? One of the best songs ever?

The tempo app that the author developed.

Put words where they don't exist.

Year of robot showmanship?

Tell me when we can get realtime stem splitting!

You already have a hardware-accelerated pair attached to your head!

Now. For example in Algoriddim DJay

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