Cole Cuchna

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, 4.

The introduction continues like this for 40 seconds, more than enough time to get us firmly locked into this rhythm.

But as the drumbeat begins to fade in behind the synths, we realize we've been duped.

See if you can spot what they did.

Pretty cool, right?

Daft Punk pulled a fast one on us.

The drum beat reveals that those grounding chords are not in fact being played on the downbeats, but rather they are syncopated.

Specifically, they're pushed, played before the downbeats, just like we heard in Voyager.

So what we thought was this... is revealed as actually being this.

What Daft Punk do here is something called a metric fakeout.

A metric fakeout is when music sets you up to think the beat is in one place, then reveals it's actually in another.

We can hear the same thing happening in 311's aptly titled Offbeat Bareass, where the introductory guitar plays what we think are downbeats, only for the drums to reveal they're actually upbeats.

Even when I told you those guitars were the upbeats, your brain interprets them as downbeats until receiving additional musical information, forcing reinterpretation.

Metric fakeouts like this play on a psychological concept known as garden pathing, which argues that if you receive enough stimulus details that typically result in a common outcome,

your brain immediately assumes that outcome and stops scanning the details.

This concept is often exemplified through what are known as garden path sentences.

Take for example this sentence, fat people eat accumulates.

Chances are your brain first heard fat people as the subject, eat as the verb, and then got confused when the sentence ended with accumulates.

But the sentence is actually fat people eat accumulates.