Music Analyst (4:18)
By the time Daft Punk began making music in the 90s, the vocoder's part human, part synthetic sound made it the perfect tool to capture the digital spirit of their robot Personas. And while the vocoder's synthetic monotone qualities had long been associated with robots, Daft Punk pushed that relationship further than anyone before them, transforming it from a novelty effect into a philosophical exploration of humanity's evolving relationship with machines. And their mastery of the vocoder was essential to that exploration, because they didn't just use it to sound like robots, they used it to sound like robots trying to sound human robots searching for emotion, for connection, for something real. The vocoder could also invert that idea, giving voice to humans, becoming more like machines, optimizing for efficiency and productivity, often at the expense of human experience. This intersection between humans and their machines is the central tension Daft Punk would explore across their entire career. And the earliest, clearest expression of this idea is Discovery's fourth track, Harder, Better, Faster Stronger. A song that doesn't just give voice to a robot through the vocoder doesn't just contain one of the greatest vocoder solos ever recorded. It's a song that ingeniously uses the vocoder to turn rapid technological evolution into something you can actually hear unfolding in real time. And I can't wait to show you exactly how they did it from the Ringer podcast network. This is dissect long form musical analysis broken into short, digestible episodes. Today we continue our examination of Daft Punk's Discovery with its fourth track, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. I'm your host, Cole Kushina. Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster Stronger is primarily composed of Samples from a single source. 1979's Cola Bottle Baby by funk and disco musician Edwin Birdsong. The main lube is pulled from the song's opening moments. As you just heard, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is not far from the original Cola Bottle Baby. However, it is a little more chopped than it might initially seem. The first thing we need to do is pitch it up, which also increases its spe. Next thing we need to do is recognize some subtle differences in the original sample source. In Cola Bottle Baby's intro, the band plays the main part, then repeats that same part again. And because it's a live band, there's some small differences in the repetition. For example, here's the part's first chord. Now here's that same chord when the part starts over. Did you notice anything different? Listen again, this time back to back. The first time there's a crash cymbal strike, the second time there's not. The synth is also slightly busier the second time, while in the first it's cleaner. Don't worry if you're having trouble hearing the differences. They're very subtle. And that's exactly why I'm pointing them out, because this is the level of detail Daft Punk is working at, identifying those nuances and making deliberate choices between them. Understanding this, let's now look at how they assembled the song's main loop. The first chop is a pretty decent chunk, taking the first four chords from take one. Now, if they kept sampling this same take, it would have sounded like this. Instead, they chopped this same part from the second take. For whatever reason, they preferred this one. So they glued it together with the first chop. But again, instead of letting that second chop continue to complete the loop, they switch back to take one for this last little bit. I'm guessing they like this version better because it's cleaner. The other take has a pretty startling extra bass note and more chord hits. Again, small details, but Daft Punk were clearly ab testing every fragment when creating this loop. Let's now hear it in full as it appears in the song. Okay, so you might think we're done, but we're not, because Daft Punk don't just repeat this same loop over and over. They do repeat it once, like we just heard, but on the third repetition, they switch to a new loop. It's very, very similar, but technically it is different. In this new loop, the second and third chops stay the same, but chop one. That main chunk now comes from take two, the one without the crash symbol and a few other minor differences. This is combined with chops two and three to create the second loop, which, like the first, is also played twice. Now, I know this was a bit tedious to break down, but that was kind of the point. What seems like a simple loop sampled verbatim from its source material actually reveals itself as being much more complex when put under a microscope. And composing with this level of detail is one of the things that separate Daft Punk from everyone else. Most producers would have just sampled the loop verbatim and called it good, and it would have been good. But as we've witnessed all season so far, Daft Punk is always willing to go the extra mile. Even if most listeners never consciously notice it, even if it makes the song just 2 or 3% better, they're going to put in that work. Now that we've broken down the main loop, I do want to return to the song's intro, because the way Daft Punk built it is really cool. Here's what it sounds like on the record. Alright, so while most of the main sample loop comes from Cola Bottle Baby's first 20 seconds or so, we have to go all the way to the end of the song to find the sound used in this introduction. Because it's around the 4 minute and 49 second mark that we hear this. Did you catch it? Yes. Daft Punk seemingly combed through the entire five minute track and honed in on this one second fragment. And then they looped it. Next, they take this tiny fragment from the end of the song and combine it with another fragment from its beginning. It comes from this part of the main sample loop. Let's clip out the small fragment we need from this section and loop it. Now let's hear how these two loops come together in the song's filtered intro. I mean, how cool is that? But even cooler still is the extra little flourish Daft Punk creates just before the main sample loop kicks in. You know this one. To create this little fill, they slice out just the initial, initial kick and bass hits from the chords in the main sample loop. So from this chord they slice out this, and from this chord they slice out this, and so on until we have these punches to work with. From these, they create this little sequence. Again, when I'm talking about Daft Punk consistently going the extra mile, this is exactly what I'm talking about. That intro is already great just with the two fragments. And for most that would be enough. But no, they found that extra little detail that really puts the part over the top. One that bridges perfectly from the intro into the main loop. We observed a similar detail when analyzing the intro of Homework's Defunct. There, the standard drum beat suddenly cuts to a sped up drum sample used only once in the entire song, acting as a fill that makes the entrance of the bassline much more impactful. These kinds of small compositional details add up over the course of an artistic career. They show up time and time again in the great works of art across history. I mean, there's thousands of artists that can paint a portrait of Mona Lisa. But it was da Vinci who dissected multiple cadavers in order to learn how the buccinator muscle and jawbone create facial expressions, and then worked obsessively to apply those details to his Mona Lisa's iconic smile. Likewise, thousands of producers could sample Cola Bottle Baby, but only Daft Punk could turn it into a meticulously designed electronic music classic. And their attention to detail and the accumulation of those details is one of the reasons why, As Harder Better progresses, we're met with the first iterations of the vocoder vocals. Specifically, Daft Punk used one called the Digitech Talker, a compact unit the size of a guitar pedal. As we touched on earlier, a vocoder essentially allows an instrument to talk by using the shape of a human voice, things like vowels and consonants to sculpt another sound, usually a synth or guitar, which controls the pitch. Creatively, you can lean into the lack of inflection and natural expression to create a monotone, robotic effect. Or you can take advantage of controlling the pitch with an instrument and make your voice do things no human voice could do alone. So, for example, I can plainly say the words, this is how a vocoder works. And using a synth to control the pitch, we can make it sound robotic. This is how a vocoder works. Or saying that same exact expression the exact same way. I can make it sound wild like this. As we'll hear Daft Punk take advantage of both use cases beginning with a monotone robotic sound. Performing two word fragments. Work it make it do it makes us. Each two word fragment is sung with a single monotone pitch. Work it is 2F sharps. Make it is also 2F sharps, but an octave higher. And do it makes us follows this same pattern, this time on an A. Leaning into these monotone pitches plays into the classic portrayal of a stereotypical robot. Variation in pitch or inflection is a distinctly human trait, one that conveys the emotion behind our words. A flat monotone delivery, by contrast, suggests rigidity and emotional absence. This idea works in tandem with the lyrics. Robots are typically built to perform specific tasks, to work endlessly without fatigue, without distraction, without the physical or mental limitations of humans in terms of productivity. Our need for food, rest and emotional balance renders us inefficient by comparison. But those are precisely the areas where robots excel, making them ideal workers, who in this case seem almost proud of their ability to operate without such limits. And that leads directly into the next phrase, Harder, better, faster, stronger. Lyrically, this completes the full line. Work it, make it do it, makes us harder, better, faster, stronger. This is a kind of mantra feedback loop where work leads to improvement, improvement leads to efficiency, and efficiency leads to increased production. Each cycle reinforces the next, a continual wheel of quote, unquote progress. And melodically, these vocal phrases evolve slightly from the first. Instead of each phrase getting a single note, each two syllable word now gets two notes. As you just heard, the overall shape of the melodic line is descending. It goes lower and lower. This contrasts the first melodic line, which was ascending. Together they create a pretty satisfying arc. The first phrase rises, the second phrase falls. So just as the two parts are connected lyrically, work it, make it do it. Makes us harder, better, faster, stronger. They're also connected melodically. We'll keep this in mind as we continue to progress throughout the song.