We'll be the first to admit we're easily dazzled by slick YouTube videos, whether it's kittens on iPads or the latest one-off commercial. Enter Nike's Music Shoe video, in which two hip young men make beats with new Nike sneakers.

The video, which was released to YouTube and Twitter on April 14, shows off the new Nike Free Run +, a running shoe set to hits U.S. stores May 1. The shoe's selling points are its flexibility and cushioning; Nike spokesman Derek Kent said it provides the "barefoot-like benefits in natural motion." In the video, the shoes also make music (but not in real life).

So how do musical shoes work? We called an electrical engineer friend who demystified the process. Turns out it's not magic, after all. Our engineer pal guesses that the shoes are outfitted with flex and accelerometer sensors which trigger samples and filters. The sound programming was likely done in Max/MSP, a media programming software. "This is the type of stuff that people do in the undergrad computer music classes," he said. "It's a pretty standard assignment. Mod a common object, make it a music controller."

The Nike spokesman said he didn't know exactly how the trick was done, other than with "special equipment that enabled the shoe to make special sounds by bending and flexing."

That said, we still find the exuberance of the two shoe-DJs (a duo who performs as Hifana) incredibly infectious. 4nchor5 la6's Tomoaki Yanagisawa and rhizomatiks' Daito Manabe are credited with modding out the shoes.