Wearable tech enters new phase as Vollebak unveils sound therapy jacket

Vollebak is marking a new era in wearable tech with the launch of the Sonic Jacket, a prototype design engineered to shift the wearer's cognitive and physiological state through sound.

The jacket is fitted with 180 inward-facing speakers, each 32mm across and 10mm deep, mounted in laser-cut holes that convey frequencies from 4Hz to 20kHz directly into the body.

"You don't listen to the Sonic Jacket. You feel it," Vollebak shared, adding that the Sonic Jacket acts as a kind of "portable, personalised sound therapy".

The jacket’s control unit features a built-in MP3 player loaded with 10 pre-set frequencies and a physical dial for fine-tuning the feed. The unit is also fitted with a reader for Micro SD cards, which can hold up to 1,000 pre-set frequencies.

While the jacket remains a prototype for now, the brand is working on a commercial model. A number of people - including professional athletes, musicians and movie directors - have already voiced their interest in purchasing the commercial version once it launches.

The jacket draws on the long history of humans using frequency to guide how they feel, from playing drums to chanting.

There is scientific backing behind this as well. It has been shown that external sound can shift the brain towards different cognitive states, which correspond to different brainwave frequencies - alpha waves for calm focus, theta for creativity and deep meditation, and gamma for flow states.

The Sonic Jacket marks only the beginning of the brand's foray into sonic wearable technology, with Vollebak co-founder Steve Tidball adding that it will be "the first in a long series".

The jacket was engineered with FBFX, a London special effects studio behind movies including Gladiator, Prometheus, The Martian and Dune.

Tidball commented on the Sonic Jacket: "Ultimately, clothing will become an advanced computational layer that mediates between the internal environment, the human and the external environment – in the same way that a spacesuit does. We were thinking about how we can start to incorporate this technology into clothing in a way that can change our mental states."

It debuted today at the brand's "interstellar" pop-up in Covent Garden. The pop-up features Spaceshop, a 1,000kg prototype interstellar delivery vehicle built in partnership with Bang & Olufsen and SAGA Space Architects.

The Spaceshop delivers 120 decibels of rocket noise and is designed to look like a re-supply vehicle that would travel to the Moon and Mars. It was first unveiled last year in Copenhagen.

Founded in 2016 by British designers and twin brothers Nick Tidball and Steve Tidball, Vollebak uses science and technology to create clothes from the future. Its designs have already won the TIME Best Inventions award twice and have included commercial jackets built using the technology used to land rovers on Mars.