- Vollebak presents a Sonic Jacket with 180 integrated speakers
- It is designed to immerse you in frequencies, not music.
- The idea is to help the brain enter “entrainment” states.
If you saw the jacket worn in the image 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 worked on films like The Martian, Dune and Marvel projects. But it’s not a costume.
This is a new technological monstrosity from clothing brand Vollebak, which we previously saw release a waterproof graphene jacket and many other novel science-inspired pieces. This is the Sonic Jacket, and it’s a big, puffy coat with 180 speakers.
That’s right, 180 speakers, each 32mm wide, spread across the torso, arms and head. They apparently emit a frequency range of 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz, so they’re much quieter than the average headphones, and Vollebak says, “You don’t hear this jacket. You feel it.”
Actually, that’s the tame part of what he says. The most notable quote is “Maybe you’ll have an orgasm. Maybe you’ll shit yourself. Maybe you’ll find God… so you might want to be careful where you use it.”
As a technical reviewer, I should probably point out: this looks about as waterproof as cotton candy. With all those wires on the outside, I’d be terrified to use it in public; it would get caught on almost anything it passed by, and it scares me to think what a rain shower would do.
You’d expect a novelty jacket like this to cost an eye-watering amount (Vollebak’s science-themed spins on clothing cost more compared to their “regular” counterparts), but the price hasn’t been revealed yet. Instead, you can join a waiting list and the full price will only be announced when it goes on sale.
Listen to a body of work
So this is basically just a portable speaker, right? Designed to make music feel incredibly immersive and annoy everyone else on the bus? Incorrect: It doesn’t look like this jacket can play music, and at least it shouldn’t.
The Sonic Jacket has a built-in MP3 player and microSD card reader, and Vollebak is also working on an app that will let you control the jacket via Bluetooth. But the brand does not talk about these as for music: rather they are for reproducing frequencies.
It seems that the goal of this jacket is to emit a consistent sound at a certain frequency, to allow you to control your mood or awaken certain brain states.
Vollebak refers to “brain hacking” and “dragging” on his jacket listing page, and frequently cites “science” drawn from the pyramids of Giza, prehistoric European ritual sites, Plato and Aristotle, Mesopotamia, and indigenous Australian ceremonies.
Call me a skeptic, but many of their explanations seem to have one foot in science and the other in conspiracy theories.
However, some good engineering has been used to do so. Apparently, having 180 speakers playing at low frequencies carried a huge fire risk. The jacket will then “exploit one of the strange ways we experience frequency” by emitting two similar frequencies, so that your body hears the frequency that exists in the difference.
As you can see, I have some doubts about all the scientific promises proposed for the jacket; anyone who quotes 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 tried Samsung’s Hearapy app, which uses 100Hz waves to calm motion sickness, so I’m ready to be proven wrong when this launches.
And if anything, I’m glad Vollebak hasn’t released a jacket for playing music on the go. Society already has too many people watching 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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