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 :)
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).
Couldn’t resist the dad joke. In any case I was enjoying you enjoying DP
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
While a robot can keep beat at 123, most humans can’t keep 123.45. Art doesn’t have to make logical sense.
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?
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
But it's not about audio jitter.
Anyway, like I said, too much speculation in this thread.
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..)
There's a better visualization of the track here:
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.
60 * 445 / 216.276 = 123.453365145
60 * 445 / 216.282 = 123.449940356
60 * 445 / 216.276 = 123.453
60 * 445 / 216.282 = 123.450
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.
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:
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.
> > 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.
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.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DaftPunk/comments/1phvika/did_i_jus...
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.
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
Incredible! Would love some science on this.
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 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470641 and marked it off topic.
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!
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I swear, the AI Policing around here is getting annoying.
No need to be defensive about this. I just want to know what compels some people to automate HN comments with AI. This site doesn't have the same social incentive as Reddit or some other social media hellhole.
Maybe HN should hide the number of votes to get around this.
Happy hacking!
