Five Voices, Two Robots, One Argument

The bass voice that opens the Pentatonix Daft Punk medley sounds like a synthesizer and isn’t. That gap—between what your ear pattern-matches and what’s physically happening—is basically the whole argument of the thing.

By late 2013, Random Access Memories had been everywhere for six months and I was done with it. Not because it was bad—it wasn’t—but because a record that ubiquitous stops being something you hear and starts being something you endure. Then Pentatonix posted their medley and I heard it again. Five voices running through Get Lucky, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, One More Time, the whole mythology, doing what a full studio apparatus normally does and somehow arriving somewhere the studio hadn’t.

Daft Punk’s music is almost entirely about texture—the robots are the texture, the vocoder is the texture, the production is the texture. Strip it all away and you’re left with melodic ideas that should, in theory, be smaller for the stripping. Pentatonix stripped everything and the songs got bigger. That shouldn’t work. It works.

What the medley also demonstrated—incidentally, not as its main point—was what YouTube had become as a venue for craft. Not just covers, not karaoke with good lighting, but people building something genuinely their own out of existing material and distributing it to millions without a label, without a budget, without anyone’s permission. Pentatonix would go on to win a Grammy for it. In 2013 they were just five people in a room making robots sound like humans, or humans sound like robots—I’m still not entirely sure which direction the trick ran.