“Make the internet weird”: This new Chrome extension lets you control YouTube videos with a surfing cat“What if you could control YouTube with a surfing cat?” It’s a question posed by music software label A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, as it launches its new Chrome extension, Speed Surfer.
So, what is Speed Surfer? Well, it basically offers you the ability to control audio in your Chrome browser – including audio speed and filter levels – with a tiny surfing cat as your interface. That’s pretty much it.

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“Slow it down. Speed it up. Make the internet weird,” the company says, as it urges users to play with audio while watching YouTube videos like never before.
Naturally, such an extension was just begging to be experimented with, so in the name of journalism, I added it to my Chrome browser myself and tried my hand at some on-the-fly YouTube DJing.
The interface is super simple; your surfing cat sits on a grid, with audio speed on the X axis and filter level – which spans between low-pass and high-pass – on the Y axis. You can adjust the speed of audio between 0.50x and 1.50x the original. 
The Y axis offers no filter frequency value, which actually feels refreshing, as it’s all too easy as a producer to work with your eyes and not your ears, as you should. I am not calling myself a producer for clicking on a surfing cat while a YouTube video plays in the background, to be clear. Or should I?
There’s also a Chaos button in the bottom right corner, which seems to randomise the values of both the speed and filter without any rhyme or reason. As a consequence, it doesn’t serve much artistic benefit while listening to your favourite tunes, but hey, why not.
And that’s pretty much it. I found it surprisingly fun to add filter sweeps to some of my favourite songs, and the gamified interface makes things all the more entertaining.
Speed Surfer is totally free, so head to the Chrome Web Store to try it out for yourself.
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