This is thematically amazing when you consider what the song is about — the roboticization of the abducted band. (Music video:)
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 it 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
And Venetian Snares encoded his cat https://eeggs.com/items/46956.html
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
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.
Into the final track of an album titled "Songs About My Cats", titled "Look". :3
There's a better visualization of the track here:
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...
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
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!
: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)
My supplemental question would be: what BPM is Cola Bottle Baby?
For those not in the know "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.
Daft Punk continues to awe us, even after their retirement.
Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!
Non related. Are your comments translated with AI or AI generated?
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!
You already have a hardware-accelerated pair attached to your head!