MacBook Pro Helps Turn Nikes into Music [Video]

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Here's how the DJ duo got the shoe flow flowing. Via Createdigitalmusic.com
Here's how the DJ duo got the shoe flow flowing. Via Createdigitalmusic.com

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyFL_ZKgTaQ

Need to put a spring in your step on a fall Friday?

Check out this video by Japanese break beat duo Hifana, it came out awhile back but we think it’s awesome.

The idea? For an ad campaign to showcase the flexibility of Nike Free Run+ shoes in Japan, they DJs use the footwear to make music, contorting and twisting the shoes to get different sounds, then battle it out DJ style

A MacBook Pro is at the heart of the operation that one half of Hifana, Daito Manabe, set up to make some sweet footie music. Nike gives a nod to the Apple power behind the project with a blink-and-you-missed it shot of a pair of MBPs in the beginning of the video.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlDBrVohXGE

Manabe did it by employing flex sensors and accelerometers to make the shoes interactive — see the making-of video above, where the MacBookPros, some with inexplicably taped-over logos, abound.

Then it was a matter of processing the control signal and converting it to sound using the modular visual programming environment Max/MSP and Ableton’s Max for Live, according to site Create Digital Music.

Back to reality: your Nike Free Run+ shoes will not make these noises. Nike wants you to know that.

But maybe they should start working on it. Don’t know about you, but I’d start pounding the pavement with a Nike running group if we could generate music with our shoes and have that rhythm pumped back into an iPod.

Via Laughing Squid, Create Digital Music

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