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 :)

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

https://stackoverflow.com/a/10760494

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!