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?
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:
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...
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.
My supplemental question would be: what BPM is Cola Bottle Baby?
There's a minor issue with the calculations. It should be:
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: So, it's the YouTube version that's 123.45 bpm to within the rounding error.[delayed]
Thinking back to when Aphex Twin encoded his face into a track: https://www.bastwood.com/?page_id=10
And Neil Cicierega hiding All Star by Smash Mouth in a dozen different places in one album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJQQymhn9o
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
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
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...
Daft Punk continues to awe us, even after their retirement.
Can't believe it's been almost 20 years since Alive 2007!
Tell me when we can get realtime stem splitting!