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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)