Most wearable technology these days is in the measurement business. Your sleep is graded, your recovery is scored, and the general feeling is that your body is a problem to be prepared for.
Vollebak, a London-based brand that previously created jackets from graphene and 250,000 pieces of laser-cut walnut, is going in the other direction entirely. Its new Sonic jacket doesn’t follow a single thing. The noise just explodes at you and you wait to see what happens.
You hear it, you don’t
The pitch is simple (though a little wild). The jacket is constructed of 180 inward-facing speakers, each 32mm in diameter, packed into laser-cut holes throughout the body, arms, and hood. They all point, not without. Everything basically turns you into a moving resonance chamber.
That covers a frequency range of 4Hz to 20,000Hz, which is far lower than any earbud you have. The result, according to founder Nick Tidball, is not like listening to music and is like “being underwater, but in mushrooms.”
Made by People Who Wear Astronauts (Fake)
Engineering comes from FBFX, the special effects studio behind the Dune, The Martian, and Project Hail Mary spacesuits. And it shows. The exposed yellow wires that stick out sound 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 founder Grant Pearmain. There were also real engineering hurdles to overcome: low frequencies heat up the speakers too much, so the jacket plays two closely related tones at once and lets your body hear the gap between them.
The Brain Hack You’re Wearing
Control goes into 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 marketing copy promises that you might “find an orgasm,” “find God,” or have an indecent experience, so set your expectations accordingly. Is the science of cognitive training fully established? Not even close. But this is just day one of what Vollebak calls a 20- to 40-year project, and frankly, we’d rather watch them swing at this than scroll through another recovery dashboard.
Specification Sheet
Brand:Vollebak
Product:Sonic Jacket (Example)
Speakers:180 inwards, 32mm wide, 10mm deep
Frequency Range:4Hz to 20,000Hz
Controls:MP3 player (10 preset frequencies), physical adjustment dial
Storage:Micro SD, up to 1,000 sound profiles
Communication:Bluetooth app (under development)
Built With:FBFX (film special effects studio)
Pricing and Availability
Sonic Jacket is an example, so there’s no price tag, no “app price” listing and no waiting list. Vollebak aims to have a commercially viable version in 2027. Go to the Vollebak website to get online.
Vollebak Sonic jacket
Vollebak packed 180 inward-facing speakers into a puffer that fires frequency directly into your body instead of into your ears, built it in a studio behind Hollywood spacesuits, and left all the wires exposed because it’s a scientific experiment and I’m proud of it.
