Most wearable tech these days is in the measurement business. Your sleep gets a grade, your recovery gets a score, and the general vibe is that your body is a problem to be optimized.
Vollebak, the London brand that’s previously built jackets from graphene and 250,000 pieces of laser-cut walnut, is going the other direction entirely. Its new Sonic Jacket doesn’t track a single thing. It just fires sound into you and waits to see what happens.
You Feel It, You Don’t Hear It
The pitch is simple (albeit a little wild). The jacket is comprised of 180 inward-facing speakers, each one 32mm across, packed into laser-cut cavities all over the body, arms, and hood. They all point in, not out. The whole thing basically turns you into a walking resonance chamber.
That covers a frequency range of 4Hz to 20,000Hz, which goes way lower than any earbud you own. The result, per co-founder Nick Tidball, is less like listening to music and more like “being underwater, but on mushrooms.”
Built by the People Who Dress Astronauts (the Fake Ones)
The engineering came from FBFX, the special effects studio behind the spacesuits in Dune, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary. And it shows. The exposed yellow wiring snaking across the surface feels like the perfect way to put all of this on display.
“It looks like a science experiment because that’s what it is,” says FBFX co-founder Grant Pearmain. There were also some real engineering hurdles to overcome: the low frequencies overheat the speakers, so the jacket plays two close tones at once and lets your body feel the gap between them.
A Brain Hack You Wear
Control runs through an MP3 player loaded with 10 preset frequencies, a physical dial for fine-tuning, and a Micro SD slot good for 1,000 sound profiles. A Bluetooth app is also in the works.
Now, Vollebak’s own marketing copy promises you might “orgasm,” “find God,” or have a considerably less dignified experience, so calibrate expectations accordingly. Is the brain-entrainment science fully settled? Not even close. But this is day one of what Vollebak calls a 20-to-40-year project, and frankly, we’d rather watch them swing at this than scroll another recovery dashboard.
Spec Sheet
Brand: Vollebak
Product: The Sonic Jacket (Prototype)
Speakers: 180 inward-facing, 32mm diameter, 10mm deep
Frequency Range: 4Hz to 20,000Hz
Controls: MP3 player (10 preset frequencies), physical tuning dial
Storage: Micro SD, up to 1,000 sound profiles
Connectivity: Bluetooth app (in development)
Built With: FBFX (film special effects studio)
Pricing & Availability
The Sonic Jacket is a prototype, so there’s no price tag yet, just a “price on application” listing and a waiting list. Vollebak is aiming for a commercially viable version by 2027. Head over to Vollebak’s website to get in line.
Recap
Vollebak Sonic Jacket
Vollebak packed 180 inward-facing speakers into a puffer that fires frequency straight through your body instead of into your ears, built it with the studio behind Hollywood’s spacesuits, and left all the wiring exposed because it’s a science experiment and proud of it.
