British clothing brand Vollebak has built a reputation designing clothes for extreme futures: jackets made with graphene, survival-focused garments and wearables imagined for space travel and climate catastrophe. But its latest project turns away from protection and endurance, asking a different question: what if clothing could change how you feel?
The result is the Vollebak Sonic Jacket, a prototype garment fitted with 180 inward-facing speakers designed to fire frequency directly into the body rather than into the surrounding environment. Developed in collaboration with London special effects studio FBFX — known for engineering costumes and spacesuits for films including Dune, Prometheus, The Martian and Project Hail Mary — the project sits somewhere between wearable technology, sensory experiment and science fiction.
Rather than tracking sleep, monitoring productivity or quantifying health metrics, the jacket proposes a softer relationship between technology and the body. There are no dashboards or performance scores here. Instead, Vollebak imagines clothing as an immersive emotional environment.
As Vollebak co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Nick Tidball explains:
“You don’t listen to the Sonic Jacket. You feel it.”
The system works through 180 miniature speakers distributed across the jacket’s body, arms and hood, each firing frequencies between 4Hz and 20,000Hz directly towards the wearer. At low frequencies, rather than risking overheating through brute force amplification, the jacket uses paired frequencies to create perceived sonic differences that can still be physically felt.
Vollebak describes the project as drawing inspiration from older relationships between sound and ritual — from chanting and drumming traditions to collective experiences of resonance and altered states. The company suggests that modern technology has largely reduced sound to entertainment, while earlier cultures understood it as something physical and transformative.
The Sonic Jacket arrives at a moment when conversations around wearable technology are increasingly dominated by optimisation: devices designed to measure bodies, monitor habits and improve performance. This project instead appears more interested in emotion and sensation.
Testing the first speaker panels reportedly produced reactions less analytical than instinctive. Tidball described early experiments as “almost underwater but on mushrooms”, with the team responding less like engineers and more like people encountering something strange for the first time.
The jacket itself remains experimental. It includes a built-in MP3 player with ten preset frequencies, a physical control dial and Micro SD support capable of storing up to 1,000 sound profiles, with a Bluetooth app currently in development.
Whether the science ultimately catches up with the ambition remains open to debate. But the Sonic Jacket feels less interesting as a wellness device than as a cultural proposition: a wearable object imagining technology not as something that measures us, but as something that might heighten sensitivity, immersion and emotional experience itself.
MORE: vollebak.com
