Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

Summary

Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? By John Scalo Google "harder better faster stronger bpm" and Google’s “AI Overview” will tell you: Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” generally sits around 123 BPM (Beats Per Minute), though some analyses find it slightly higher (like 123.48 BPM) or list different BPMs in remixes/workouts, with exact figures varying slightly by source and version. Spotify’s metadata database, SongBPM, and most other online BPM databases list it at exactly 123. But I think our helmet-clad robot friends might have been making a little joke that we’ve apparently all missed. The BPM of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is actually 123.45. How do I know this? It so happens that for over 10 years I’ve written an app called Tempi that shows the music BPM in real time, so I know a little bit about the science and algorithms behind music tempo detection. Most tempo detection software works basically the same way: A specialized algorithm called the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) collects overlapping energy levels at different frequency bands. Those levels are refined into well-defined peaks that represent rhythmic events in the track. Another algorithm (autocorrelation) looks for patterns, or more accurately periodicity, in those peaks. But these patterns are tricky because there’s all kinds of noise, performance inaccuracies, and rhythmic harmonics throwing things off. All that is to say, a) it’s complicated and b) it’s not perfectly accurate. When I make changes to my own system of course I need some way to know if it’s getting better or worse, so I have a test library of hundreds of song snippets that I score it against. One of these songs is Daft Punk’s HBFS, and early on I noticed something strange about that track. Almost all electronic music is synced to a sequencer and so obviously is going to have a very steady tempo. But while the vast majority of electronic music tracks I test have ...