- Vollebak unveils a Sonic Jacket with 180 built-in speakers
- It is 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 photo 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 has worked on films such as The Martian, Dune and Marvel projects. But it’s not a costume.
This is a new technological monstrosity from clothing brand Vollebak, who we’ve previously seen release a graphene rain jacket and quite a few other new pieces of science-inspired clothing. This is the Sonic Jacket and it’s a big puffy coat with 180 speakers.
That’s right, 180 speakers, each 32mm across, spread across your torso and arms and head. They apparently emit a frequency range from 4Hz to 20,000Hz, so they go much lower than your average earphones, with Vollebak claiming “You’re not listening to this jacket. You’re feeling it.”
In fact, that is the tame part of what it claims. The more notable quote is “Maybe you’ll orgasm. Maybe you’ll screw 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 the outside, I’d be afraid to wear this in public; it would catch almost anything you pass and I dread to think what a downpour would do.
You’d expect a new jacket like this to cost an eye-watering amount – Vollebak’s scientific twists on clothing command a premium over their ‘normal’ equivalents – but a price hasn’t been revealed yet. Instead, you can sign up for a waiting list, where the full price will only be published when it is on sale.
Listening to a work
So this is basically just a portable speaker right? Designed to make the music feel incredibly immersive and annoy everyone else on the bus? Wrong: It doesn’t sound like this jacket can even play music—or at 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 lets 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 whole point of this jacket is to emit consistent sound at a certain frequency, to let you control your mood or induce certain brain states.
Vollebak refers to “brain hacking” and “entrainment” in the list on his jacket, and often cites “science” drawn from the pyramids of Giza, prehistoric European ritual sites, Plato and Aristotle, Mesopotamia and aboriginal 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 neat engineering has been used to make it. Apparently having 180 speakers playing at low frequencies presented a huge fire risk. So the jacket “will take advantage of 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’m a bit skeptical about all the proposed scientific promises about 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 tuned 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 comes out.
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 watching TikTok loudly on their phone in public, I don’t need it coming from a jacket with 180 speakers.
(Via Yanko Design)
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