- Vollebak reveals a Sonic Jacket with 180 built-in speakers
- It’s designed to immerse you in frequencies, not music
- The idea is to help get your brain into “entrainment” states
If you saw the jacket worn in the picture above and thought it looked like something out of a sci-fi movie, you’re not wrong. It was designed by a special effects team that’s worked on movies such as The Martian, Dune and Marvel projects. But it’s no costume.
This is a new technological monstrosity from clothing brand Vollebak, which we previously saw release a graphene rain jacket, and quite a few other novel pieces of science-inspired clothing. This is the Sonic Jacket, and it’s a big puffy coat bearing 180 speakers.
That’s right, 180 speakers, each one 32mm across, spread across your torso and arms and head. They apparently output a frequency range from 4Hz to 20,000Hz, so they go a lot lower than your average earbuds, with Vollebak claiming “You don’t listen to this jacket. You feel it.”
Actually, that’s the tame part of what it claims. The more notable quote is “Maybe you’ll orgasm. Maybe you’ll shit yourself. Maybe you’ll find God… so maybe you’ll want to be careful where you wear it.”
As a tech reviewer, I should probably note: this thing looks about as waterproof as candy floss. With all those wires on its outside, I’d be terrified to wear this in public; it’d catch on just about anything you pass, and I’m scared to think about what a rain shower would do.
You’d expect a novel jacket like this to cost an eye-watering amount — Vollebak’s scientific-themed twists on clothing fetch a premium compared to their ‘normal’ equivalents — but a price hasn’t been revealed yet. Instead, you can join a waiting list, with the full price only to be announced when it’s on sale.
Listening to a body of work
So, this is basically just a wearable loudspeaker right? Designed to make music feel incredibly immersive, and annoy everyone else on the bus? Wrong: it doesn’t sound like this jacket can even play music — and at the very least, it shouldn’t.
The Sonic Jacket has a built-in MP3 player and microSD card reader, with Vollebak also working on an app that’ll let you control the jacket via Bluetooth. But the brand doesn’t talk about these as for music: instead, they’re for playing frequencies.
It sounds like the entire point of this jacket to output consistent sound at a set frequency, in order to let you control your mood or awaken certain brain states.
Vollebak refers to “brain hacking” and “entrainment” in the listing page for its jacket, and frequently cites “science” taken from the Pyramids in Giza, prehistoric European ritual sites, Plato and Aristotle, Mesopotamia and Indigenous Australian ceremonies.
Call me a skeptic, but lots of their explanations seem to have one foot in science, and the other in conspiracy theories.
Some neat engineering has been used to make it, though. Apparently, having 180 speakers playing at low frequencies bore a huge fire risk. So the jacket “will exploit one of the strange ways we experience frequency” by outputting two similar frequencies, so your body hears the frequency that exists in the difference.
As you can tell, I’m a little dubious about all the proposed scientific promises of the jacket; anyone who cites the music of the spheres deserves a raised eyebrow or two. But there’s something to be said for the benefits of set frequencies — I recently tested Samsung’s Hearapy app which uses 100Hz waves to quell motion sickness — and so I’m ready to be proven wrong when this thing does release.
And if anything, I’m glad Vollebak didn’t actually release a jacket for playing music on the go. Society already has too many people who watch TikTok out loud on their phone in public, I don’t need it coming from a 180-speaker jacket.
(Via Yanko Design)
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tom.bedford@hotmail.co.uk (Tom Bedford)
