inside vollebak's sonic jacket, an emotional resonance chamber for the body

vollebak alters emotions with new sonic jacket

Over the past few years, conversations around technology and the body have become increasingly shaped by ideas of optimisation. Devices monitor sleep, stress, productivity, recovery, and movement. The body is treated as something to measure, improve, and regulate. At the same time, a quieter countercurrent has started to emerge across design, fashion, and contemporary culture. One that values sensitivity over performance and emotional attunement over efficiency. Within that shift, softness becomes less an aesthetic than a way of relating to the world through feeling and sensory awareness.

Vollebak’s new Sonic Jacket sits within that territory. Known for designing wearable technology built for extreme environments and speculative futures, the London-based brand has spent years imagining how clothing might protect the body against radiation, climate collapse, and space travel. The Sonic Jacket turns away from those hardened futures and moves inward instead. Rather than shielding the wearer from the outside world, the prototype is designed to alter how the wearer feels from within.

all images courtesy of Vollebak

sonic jacket built in collaboration with fbfx

The jacket is fitted with 180 inward-facing speakers that fire frequency directly into the body. Built with FBFX, the special effects studio behind ‘Dune’, ‘Prometheus’, ‘The Martian’, and ‘Project Hail Mary’, the garment transforms sound into something tactile and immersive. It operates less like a conventional wearable device and more like a responsive atmosphere that surrounds the body in vibration, resonance, and sensation. 

For Vollebak Chief Creative Officer and co-founder Nick Tidball, the idea emerged from a fascination with the invisible ways sound already affects the body emotionally and physically. ‘The idea started to feel possible as soon as I realised that the cat we have, Baltie, has a frequency of 90 hertz when he purrs,’ he says. ‘Certain studies have talked about how that feels really good for you and is really good for your bones.’ 

volleback chief creative officer and co-founder Nick Tidball

sonic frequency enables meditative states

That curiosity quickly expanded into a broader meditation on sound as both force and care. ‘As soon as I thought that, and then I also thought about the opposing idea, or a similar idea, but in a bad way, of sonic weaponry, the idea occurred to me that if you can have sonics that are used for not good things, you should also be able to have sonics that can be used for good things,’ Tidball explains. ‘So, sonics for good versus sonics for bad.’ 

The Sonic Jacket feels significant because it proposes a softer relationship between technology and the body at a moment when most wearable systems operate through extraction and analysis. Instead of asking users to quantify themselves, the garment attempts to shift emotional and physiological states directly through frequency. There are no dashboards, scores, or performance metrics. The technology works through immersion rather than information.

rather than hearing sound externally, the wearer experiences it internally as vibration

technology as a way to change brain state

‘It was incredibly important that we made a piece of technology that was far more about gut instinct feelings, or changing your brain state, or changing your body state in a way that is utterly to do with how you feel,’ Tidball says. That emphasis on feeling fundamentally changes the emotional language surrounding wearable technology. The Sonic Jacket is not presented as a tool for becoming more productive or more efficient. Instead, it is framed around emotional immediacy, altered states, and sensory connection.

‘It’s unbelievably fascinating to create a piece of clothing that can change your state — change how your brain is feeling, how your consciousness works, how your brain waves are working,’ Tidball says. He continues: ‘It’s an incredibly important part of being a human being, feeling happiness or joy, or lightness or love, or the sensation of the sunshine on you.’ 

Nick Tidball with a first prototype of the Sonic Jacket | image by Mike Palmer Photo

emotional sensitivity packaged in 180 speakers

That language of warmth, softness, and embodiment runs throughout the project. Even with its cinematic collaborators and sci-fi engineering, the Sonic Jacket repeatedly returns to emotional sensitivity rather than technological spectacle. The garment’s 180 speakers are mounted throughout laser-cut cavities inside the jacket and generate frequencies ranging from 4Hz to 20kHz. Rather than hearing sound externally, the wearer experiences it internally as vibration moving through the body itself.

‘You don’t listen to the Sonic Jacket,’ Tidball explains. ‘You feel it.’

That distinction became immediately clear during the first experiments with FBFX. Before building the full prototype, Vollebak developed two small speaker panels containing just 18 speakers in total. The team held them against different parts of the body while testing frequencies.

sonic jacket breaks new tech ground for vollebak

‘Once you started firing frequency through you, and you only had those two panels, the 18 speakers, you instantly realised this worked because it was like being underwater,’ Tidball recalls. ‘Almost underwater but on mushrooms. It was absolutely bonkers.’ The reaction was emotional rather than analytical. ‘We had very childlike reactions, and we all started grinning, saying, “Oh my gosh, what have we invented?”’

For a brand that has often explored survival and technological resilience, the Sonic Jacket introduces a noticeably different emotional register. Tidball acknowledges that shift directly. ‘Because this is a jacket that fires frequency through you, it obviously did have very different challenges to something that maybe keeps the weather out, or is designed to last 100 years,’ he says. ‘It really had to be geared around that singular idea of how do I fire frequency through somebody’s body?’ 

frequencies of 140 hertz and 180 hertz can be felt through the entire body

project draws on history and ancient cultures

The project also draws heavily from older histories of sound, ritual, and collective resonance. Tidball describes becoming increasingly interested in the possibility that ancient cultures may have understood the effects of frequency more intuitively than modern society does now. ‘My brother and I are obsessed with the idea that we probably were far more in touch with what frequencies and sounds could do to the human body thousands of years ago, more so than we are aware of as humans now,’ he says.

From chanting rituals to resonant stone chambers, the team became fascinated by how sound once operated collectively and physically rather than passively. ‘I think we have probably lost a fair part of our knowledge about what sound and frequency can do to the human body and what it can do to the human brain,’ Tidball explains. 

the jacket’s control unit includes a built-in MP3 player preloaded with ten preset frequencies

futuristic garment reconnects body to its senses

That historical reference point feels important. The Sonic Jacket does not simply imagine a futuristic wearable. It imagines technology reconnecting the body to forms of sensory experience that modern systems often suppress or overlook. Once the hood is raised, the experience becomes fully immersive. Listening dissolves into bodily sensation. ‘Your ears, you realise, are just one tiny part of you,’ Tidball says. ‘You are hearing and feeling the sound with your entire body, which is a very odd sensation because it’s not something you’re terribly used to.’

While testing higher frequencies through the completed 180-speaker prototype, Tidball noticed dramatic changes in how deeply the sound travelled through the body. ‘At 180 hertz, it was in my entire body,’ he says. ‘The only way I can describe the feeling was it felt like the sunshine was inside me.’

while testing the completed 180-speaker prototype, Tidball noticed dramatic changes in sound moving through the body | image by Mike Palmer Photo

built-in mp3 player with set frequencies and sound

Designing that level of immersion required balancing sensation with wearability. Too many speakers would make the garment impossible to wear comfortably. Too few would weaken the frequencies moving through the body. ‘You had to work with design and comfort and weight and sensation all in tandem,’ Tidball explains. ‘You had to think about all those things simultaneously.’ 

The jacket’s control unit includes a built-in MP3 player preloaded with ten preset frequencies alongside a physical dial for modulation and Micro SD support capable of storing up to 1,000 sound profiles. A Bluetooth-connected companion app is currently in development. Yet despite those technical systems, Tidball repeatedly frames the project as exploratory rather than deterministic.

‘I think what’s going to happen over this coming year, as we start experimenting extensively with this jacket, is we’re going to find out what this jacket can do,’ he says. Different frequencies may affect different bodies differently. Some users may seek meditative calm while others pursue heightened creativity or euphoria.

the garment’s 180 speakers are mounted throughout laser-cut cavities inside the jacket

sonic jacket as artistic inspiration and emotional tool

‘I think we’re going to find that a bunch of creatives are going to want to use this jacket. Similarly, I think artists will want to use this jacket, as probably sportspeople will. People’s agendas for how they want to use this will probably be relatively varied’, explains Tidball. ‘I think there are already frequencies we’re aware of that you wouldn’t want as a human, but I think what we’re excited by is understanding and seeing what different types of frequencies different humans want, and for different needs.’

 At a moment when technology increasingly asks the body to become more measurable, productive, and controlled, Vollebak’s Sonic Jacket imagines another possibility. One where technology heightens sensitivity rather than reducing it. One where clothing becomes less about optimisation and more about emotional resonance, immersion, and feeling.

project info:

name: Sonic Jacket

brand: Vollebak