Comment by tibbon
4 days ago
I'd have to check, but I wonder what pitch the song is in? Could have it just been sped up ever so slightly in mastering, or even just between tape playback from mixing to mastering?
I have to wonder if this is like Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz - viewers can imply all sorts of intent that is very unlikely to have been there originally. A small mistake or tweak in any layer of processing could have easily done this.
It’s important for electronic music to have consistent and predictable pitch, otherwise djs on stage will have hard time to play (they loop a start of the song and play it together with tail loop of previous song), so Daft Punk need to intentionally choose fractional BPM as mastering engineers will not change pitch even slightly
DJs routinely change the playback speed to match tempos.
It’s easier if a track’s tempo stays the same throughout its duration, but even if it changes, DJs will adjust the playback speed on the fly.
As far as syncing is concerned, the actual value of the tempos doesn't matter at all.