2021 was a year to forget for many reasons, but for some fans, the breakup of Daft Punk still resonates. After 28 years of pure electronic music, the duo called it quits. In February, the first anniversary of the split was marked, and engineer Ben Combee decided to pay a small tribute with a musical word clock based on the classic Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.
Despite already having nearly a decade of career by then, my first exposure to Daft Punk was with One More Time, the single from their second album Discovery from 2001. With a little over 20 years old and a constant overdose of anime in my veins, the video for One More Time blew my mind, as did its direct sequels, and the final compilation in Interstella 5555.
Obviously, one of those sequels is Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, and I bet you're already humming it. Did you know that there are 18 words in the lyrics of that song? The rest are simple combinations, and that means the song is a great candidate for becoming a musical word clock. Engineer Ben Combee did exactly that.
A musical word clock with Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
The base of the project is an Adafruit PyBadge, based on the ATSAMD51 chip with a frequency of 120 MHz, and the general format of a credit card. The PyBadge already includes a speaker and a 1.8-inch screen, but the main challenge is storage, which does not exceed 2 MB. The original version of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger exceeds 7 MB at its maximum quality, so he had to downmix to mono, and then to a bitrate of 32 Kbps, leaving the song at 892 kilobytes.
He then encountered volume and synchronization issues between the audio and the word clock display, for which he ended up using a 12 x 7 letter matrix. Finally, with some corrections and a recent patch, anyone interested in creating the clock just has to download the relevant code and load it onto their PyBadge, or why not, any compatible microcontroller in the future. The enclosures for the PyBadge are available both on Thingiverse and other sites that distribute 3D printing models.
Official site and code: Click here
