I’ve created a website that allows easy discovery of interesting Youtube videos. It’s at FindInteresting.com.
Videos are shown in a collage of thumbnails as in the screenshot at right. It starts off with your favorite videos or a search term. Then if you click a video it will load more thumbnails on your screen, in particular: the favorite videos of the person who created that video.
To start, enter your youtube channel name to show your favorites, or enter a search term like “jazz”. Then click videos to load more thumbnails. You can hover your mouse over a video to read its title. Double click a video to load it in a popup player.
Once the player is open, you can click the link in the top right corner to watch the video on Youtube instead, where you can write comments below the video, “like” it, or add it to your favorites.
Here is a video where I explain how to use the site:
Why is this cool? For a number of reasons I think:
Showing only thumbnails and no text allows the eye to quickly scan over hundreds, or even thousands of videos to pick out the ones that might be interesting to watch. We have a much better visual ability to pick out patterns and process large amounts of information from images rather than text. Also the fact that no text is used breaks down language barriers, especially for music videos.
The Pop up player makes watching the first 5 seconds of a video really easy (the user can click away from the player and it will disappear, or click the X button in the popup to close it). This allows you to check out a video to determine if it is worth watching, and easily dismiss it, if it isn’t what you expect.
When clicking a video, the favorites of the video’s creator are loaded below as thumbnails. This works really quickly to discover videos that will be interesting to you, on the principle that if you like a video, you’ll enjoy watching the videos that its creator likes too.
Since creating this site, I have spent many enjoyable leisure hours watching lots of videos and discovering some wonderful music from around the world. I really recommend trying it out, and please let me know what you think.
This week’s video is about the “Diatonic System” in music, which is where you can play a lot of different types of chords and melodies, all within one key. To keep things simple we stick to the key of C Major.
Please note that Upbeat Evil Castle has been agreed on by the composers Gustavo and Geoff to allow Geoff to use the song in his videos on Geoffmobile.com and Youtube.com/geoffmobile.
Last night I recorded myself performing the jazz standard Giant Steps on the piano. In this video I give a 1 minute introduction to the song and then perform it. If you’re interested in the audio only, you can grab the MP3 from here or use the audio player above.
We made a video of one of the songs, My Foolish Heart by Ned Washington and Victor Young. It’s available on Youtube or by using the player below. Hope you enjoy!
Last night I made a video recording of myself performing an original jazz bebop tune on the piano. It’s called Ocean Apart and I wrote it last summer while taking a composition class with New York jazz pianist Misha Piatigorsky.
You can view the video on Youtube, Blip.tv, or use the player below.
My friend Marcus dropped by today for a visit, and we recorded an improvised performance of synthesizer and piano. It’s called Heartbeet. We named it this maybe because we both really like to eat beets, (yum!) and so therefore “heart” them, as well as because we were wanting to play on the concept of the pulsating bass drum that sometimes goes out of time from the piano, much like a heart beat will continue its own rhythm oblivious to the other rhythms around it.
The video is also available on Blip.tv and the Mp3 file for the song is available here.
I’ve created a website that allows easy discovery of interesting Youtube videos. It’s at FindInteresting.com.
