I have never though I would have the chance to write about such a thing, namely describing what a Nike ad campaign actually is. I for one remember that from the first time I saw a commercial for shoes, the presenter or actor in the ad bent and twisted the shoe so we could see it resists full bends.

Nike took that to a whole new level, and collaborated with experimental music producer and DJ, Daito Manabe, famous for his research into sound controllers. What Daito did was to fit the shoes you can see above in the picture, with flex sensor and came up with a rig to connect all of them, and use them as controllers, since the flex sensors change resistance when bent. Since a flex sensor can sport a resistance of 10,000 ohms or more when idle, and up to 30 or 40 ohms when bent at 90 degrees, Daito managed to deliver some impressive sound manipulations.

The music producer took advantage of the high potential of Ableton's Max for Live and Max/MSP, and along with a friend, made quite a show for a limited group of people. It would take too long to explain all the cabling and patching the experimental music producer used for this clip, but I can at least mention a couple of resonating names present in the video.

First of all, some of you might already have recognized the two Pioneer DJM-700S professional DJ mixers used for inputting the signal from either a FireFace 400 professional sound card and the signal from the loop machine. All in all, the campaign made its point easily, as the clip you can see below shows 14 shoes getting twisted and flexed continuously throughout the ad, aside from just bending it once like in a regular commercial.



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