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The Sonic Jacket fires frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz directly into your body.

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Humans have used frequency and patterned sound to change how they feel for thousands of years – generating calm, ecstasy and even a little bit of enlightenment. From drums around fires and chanting in stone chambers, to rattles and flutes in ceremonies of healing and initiation. Now we’ve taken these ancient ideas and used them in a new kind of transcendental technology, a jacket loaded with 180 speakers that fire frequency directly into your body.

Evenly distributed across the jacket's body, arms and hood, each speaker is just 32mm in diameter and 10mm deep, mounted in laser cut holes and able to generate frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz. All fire inward towards the body rather than out into the room. So you don't listen to this jacket. You feel it.

Maybe you’ll orgasm. Maybe you’ll shit yourself. Maybe you’ll find God… so maybe you’ll want to be careful where you wear it.

The world’s first sonic clothing

Name: The Sonic Jacket
Brand: Vollebak
Availability: OutOfStock

The Sonic Jacket fires frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz directly into your body.

180 tiny speakers, one unified sound field

Evenly distributed across the jacket's body, arms and hood, each speaker is just 32mm in diameter and 10mm deep, mounted in laser cut holes, and able to generate frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz. All fire inward towards the body rather than out into the room. So you don't listen to this jacket. You feel it.

From 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz

At the lowest frequencies, speakers can overheat. To get over this, the jacket will exploit one of the strange ways we experience frequency. If we are ‘played’ two slightly different frequencies, say 100 Hz and 104 Hz, we hear or feel the difference between the two – which is 4 Hz in this case. That’s how the jacket produces ultra-low frequencies without doing something less fun… like catching fire.

Controlling your frequency feed

The jacket has a number of different ways to control your frequency feed. A control unit includes an MP3 player delivering 10 pre-set frequencies while a large physical dial lets you explore and fine-tune the frequencies that really make you feel good. The unit is also fitted with a reader for Micro SD cards which can hold up to 1,000 pre-set frequencies so you can create your personalised library. We’re also working on a Sonic Jacket app that will connect to the control unit via Bluetooth.

Maybe you’ll orgasm. Maybe you’ll shit yourself. Maybe you’ll find God… so maybe you’ll want to be careful where you wear it.

Building the impossible

To build the Sonic Jacket we worked with FBFX, the London-based special effects studio that has spent 30 years engineering costumes for film and television. Established in 1993, FBFX has grown from a small workshop into one of the UK's leading makers of specialist armour, spacesuits and superhero outfits. Their credits include Gladiator, Halo, Star Wars, Prometheus, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Martian, Dune and Deadpool & Wolverine.

From the guys who build Hollywood’s spacesuits

FBFX operates as a "concept to completion" house, combining traditional workshop craft with in-house 3D scanning and digital fabrication. Techniques range from fibreglass and silicone moulding to CNC machining, photogrammetry and advanced materials work. They've built costumes that survive explosions, and that actors can fight in, all of which hold up under the scrutiny of IMAX cameras.

It looks like a science experiment, because it is one

For this project, they brought the same precision that goes into engineering a functional spacesuit for Matt Damon into turning a jacket into a distributed speaker system. The jacket’s design is deliberately raw and functional. We’ve left the yellow wiring visible, the engineering exposed. "It's made to look like a science experiment because that's what it is," says FBFX co-founder Grant Pearmain. "We're not hiding the wires. Far from it."

Engineered with the studio that builds spacesuits for Hollywood.

A new reality of sonic environments

Right now we treat sound as entertainment or annoyance. Something we consciously choose to stream into our ears, or block. But if you start to think of your sonic environment as a physical field that surrounds and interacts with your body, it stops being entertainment and becomes something closer to state-altering technology. And the delivery systems we use today – earbuds, headphones, speakers – won't necessarily be the delivery systems of the future. We can't promise enlightenment or flow states on demand. But we can put you inside a wearable sound field calibrated to frequencies that have fascinated humans for millennia. The science of frequency and consciousness is still being written. And we want to help write it.

From ritual noise to healing sound

The earliest uses of sound for wellbeing were embedded in ritual, not medicine. Australian Aboriginal healers use the didgeridoo in ceremonies aimed at restoring spiritual and social balance, its low drones and pulsed rhythms strongly coupled to breath, chest vibration and trance. In ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian temples, sung prayers and musical incantations were used alongside herbs and amulets. Illness was a spiritual imbalance and sound was one route back to alignment. Patterned vibration was a path to group bonding, meaning making and altered states.

The music of the spheres

Classical Greek philosophy turned experience into theory. For Pythagoras and his followers, simple musical ratios, octaves, thirds and fifths, were evidence that the cosmos and the body were structured mathematically. This was the "music of the spheres", the idea that music could tune the soul as you tune a lyre string. Plato and Aristotle developed ideas of ethical acoustics, arguing that particular modes and rhythms encouraged courage, restraint or contemplation. In India and China, Nada Yoga treated sustained tones and mantras as a route to meditative absorption while Chinese qigong pairs specific syllables with organs and emotions, using sound to regulate qi.

For millennia, humans have built spaces and rituals around a patterned vibration.

Resonant architecture

Temples, cathedrals and megalithic chambers don't just contain sound, they shape, sustain and amplify it. The room becomes part of the instrument. Recent acoustic studies of Hindu temples show that pillared halls and carved stone surfaces create highly diffuse sound fields, with strong resonance and long reverberation that envelop chanting and bells. At Meenakshi Amman temple, some columns are carved as "musical pillars" that ring with clear notes when struck. Work on Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, built a millennium and half ago, has shown that its enormous dome produces a reverberation time of around 11 seconds, so that chant blends into an almost continuous halo of sound.

The Megalith Frequency

Archaeoacousticians study the sophisticated sonic mechanics of sacred spaces. They have found that chambers in many prehistoric sites in Europe and the Mediterranean strongly amplify frequencies around 108 Hz to 110 Hz, the “megalith frequency”, overlapping with male chants and drum tones. The American psychiatrist and neuroscientist Ian Cook found that at 110 Hz, the brain shifts from analytical and verbal focus towards emotion and non-verbal processing. These chambers were machines for generating calm introspection. Whether ancient builders understood this or simply worked until they got a building to sound the way they wanted, the result is the same, spaces that hack our brainwaves.

Ancient stone chambers amplify tones around 110 Hz, a frequency that shifts brain activity toward introspection.

Pyramids as frequency machines

The Great Pyramid of Giza has become a focal point for studies into architecture and sonics. Its internal chambers behave as acoustic resonators, supporting standing waves at particular frequencies. Measurements in the King's Chamber indicate strong modes in the low-frequency range, with some analyses highlighting a resonance near 117 Hz. The granite coffer inside the chamber has its own resonant frequencies, excited by striking or humming into it. Christopher Dunn's "Giza Power Plant” theory argues that the whole structure is a coupled oscillator that converts seismic vibration into energy via piezoelectric granite.

Brainwaves and mental states

Neuroscience has given us a more precise map of how different frequencies affect our mental state. Alpha waves, around 8 Hz to 12 Hz, are associated with relaxed wakefulness, internal focus and reduced sensory distraction. Theta, around 4 Hz to 8 Hz, shows up in drowsiness, early sleep, deep meditation and certain creative tasks. Gamma activity, roughly 30 Hz to 100 Hz, correlates with higher-order cognition and focused attention, working memory. Flow states – the feeling of total absorption in a task – have been linked to increased frontal theta alongside moderate alpha and bursts of gamma. The brain, it turns out, has frequency signatures for different modes of being.

The Sonic Jacket uses 180 miniaturised speakers to create a unified sound field.

The entrainment business

The idea that external sound can nudge the brain toward specific states is called entrainment. Present a rhythmic stimulus and the brain's oscillations may start to synchronise with it. Pump slightly different tones into each ear, say 210 Hz and 200 Hz, and the auditory system generates a perceived third beat at the difference frequency, 10 Hz, which the brain allegedly follows. This is called the frequency-following response and it's the theoretical underpinning of binaural beats and a growing number of apps, wearables and YouTube channels promising alpha for relaxation, theta for meditation, gamma for focus.

The godfather of brain hacking

The man who came up with binaural beats was Robert Monroe. A radio executive who owned a production company in 1950s Virginia, Monroe began experimenting with sound patterns for learning during sleep. In 1958, he unexpectedly started experiencing powerful vibrational states and episodes of apparent separation from his body, experiences he later documented in the book Journeys Out of the Body and two sequels. Rather than dismiss them, he spent the rest of his life trying to understand and reproduce them. In 1974, he founded the Monroe Institute as a non-profit research centre devoted to the systematic exploration of altering consciousness through sound.

Hemi-Sync and the whole-brain state

The Monroe Institute's signature contribution is Hemi-Sync, short for hemispheric synchronisation. By choosing carrier tones and difference frequencies that correspond to particular EEG bands – delta for deep sleep, theta for trance-like states, alpha for relaxed wakefulness, beta for focused attention – Monroe's team argued they could steer brain activity toward those states at will. Their programs layer binaural beats with music, pink noise and natural sounds to encourage what Monroe called a "whole-brain state”. The Institute now runs programs for sleep induction, pain management, surgical recovery, focused learning and meditative experience.

The future of wearable sound fields

The Sonic Jacket is not a one-off experiment. The science of frequency and consciousness is still being written. And this jacket will play a part in writing it. Portable, personalised, immersive sound therapy will become an essential tool when we want to feel more, or less, human. As a wearable resonance chamber, engineered to shift the wearer's cognitive and physiological state through sound, it marks the start of a new era in wearable technology.