I would highly recommend YouTube surfing while leaving iTunes to its own devices– you never know how it’ll turn out.  And that’s essentially what Vintage Veta and I did to discover the funkalicious video phenomenon just below this paragraph. I’ll let you in on the secret of this video: No matter what part of the Daft Punk track we skipped to while watching Soul Train, it always turned out awesome.  As a result, I didn’t feel so guilty about completely failing to edit this video to rhythmic perfection in iMovie… being the smug, professional Final Cut user I am.  It makes me feel like Mac made iMovie counterintuitive on purpose in order to promote artistic experimentation in its truest form… how clever.  You might argue, “Hey Dan, this is in no way as awesome as Dark Side of Oz.” Good guess!  I addressed that issue in the blurb below this first video.

If you haven’t watched “Dark Side of Oz” (Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd synced with The Wizard of Oz)– it’s really cool (or uncool– at the very least, interesting,) and it’s on YouTube.  And it’s as much of a coincidental finding as the Soul Train video I experimented on– hence the ambiguity of their combined coolness.  Alan Parsons (Dark Side of the Moon engineer) put it best in a Rolling Stone interview, when he explained:

It was an American radio guy who pointed it out to me. It’s such a non-starter, a complete load of eyewash. I tried it for the first time about two years ago. One of my fiancee’s kids had a copy of the video, and I thought I had see what it was all about. I was very disappointed. The only thing I noticed was that the line “balanced on the biggest wave” came up when Dorothy was kind of tightrope walking along a fence. One of the things any audio professional will tell you is that the scope for the drift between the video and the record is enormous; it could be anything up to twenty seconds by the time the record’s finished. And anyway, if you play any record with the sound turned down on the TV, you will find things that work.

So… Alan Parsons says EXPERIMENT!  But judge for yourself:

Still unsure whether it’s coincidence or freakish premeditation?  Go watch Alice in Wonderland and TELL me that wasn’t also done on purpose.  Case closed.  Someone even did it for you already:

So the moral of the story is:
A) Video-music mashups are cool, but any monkey throwing darts at a music playlist could come up with a cool idea.
B) Some ideas are better than others.  You could probably come up with a decent one if you’re watching something and it makes you think of a song.  Or vice versa.
C) Tempo estimation should be an afterthought– just continue to throw things together and see what happens.  Experiment.  Again, like a monkey throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks– it’s bound to entertain you (eventually, with minimal patience).
D) Yes!  I just compared myself to a monkey.  Now you understand how art works, and why primates make the best artists!

[ed note: Vintage Veta actually thought of the entire Daft Punk idea while we were watching Soul Train-- no monkeys were harmed in the process].