- Vollebak unveils a Sonic Jacket with 180 integrated speakers
- It’s designed to immerse you in frequencies, not music
- The idea is to help your brain get into “training” 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 who worked on films such as The Martian, Dune and Marvel projects. But it’s not a costume.
It’s a new technological monstrosity from clothing brand Vollebak, which we’ve already seen release a graphene rain jacket and many other innovative science-inspired clothing items. It’s the Sonic Jacket, and it’s a big puffy coat carrying 180 speakers.
That’s right, 180 speakers, each 32mm in diameter, spread across your torso, arms and head. They apparently emit a frequency range of 4Hz to 20,000Hz, so they go much lower than your average headphones, with Vollebak claiming “You don’t listen to this jacket. You feel it.”
In fact, that’s the modest part of what he claims. The most notable quote is “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.”
As a tech reviewer, I should probably note: this thing feels as waterproof as cotton candy. With all those wires on the outside, I’d be terrified to wear this in public; it would affect just about everything you pass by, and I dread to think what a rain shower would do.
You’d expect a new jacket like this to cost an exorbitant amount of money – Vollebak’s science-themed revamps cost more than their ‘normal’ equivalents – but the price has yet to be revealed. Instead, you can sign up for a waiting list, with the full price only announced when it goes on sale.
Listen to a work
So this is just a portable speaker, right? Designed to make the music incredibly immersive and annoy every other passenger on the bus? Wrong: It doesn’t even look like this jacket can play music – and at the very 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 will let you control the jacket via Bluetooth. But the brand doesn’t talk about it like music: it’s more about playing frequencies.
It seems that the point of this jacket is to produce a coherent sound at a defined frequency, in order to allow you to control your mood or awaken certain brain states.
Vollebak refers to “brain hacking” and “training” in his jacket’s listing page, and frequently cites “science” drawn from the pyramids of Giza, European prehistoric ritual sites, Plato and Aristotle, Mesopotamia and Australian indigenous ceremonies.
Call me a skeptic, but many of their explanations seem to have one foot in science and the other in conspiracy theories.
However, careful engineering was used to make it happen. Apparently, having 180 speakers blasting low frequencies presented a huge fire hazard. So the jacket will “exploit one of the strange ways we perceive frequency” by emitting two similar frequencies, so your body hears the frequency that exists in the difference.
As you can tell, I’m a little dubious about all the scientific promises the jacket offers; anyone who cites 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 tested Samsung’s Hearapy app which uses 100Hz waves to soothe motion sickness – and so I’m prepared to be proven wrong when this thing comes out.
And if anything, I’m glad that Vollebak didn’t actually pull out a jacket for playing music on the go. Society already has too many people watching TikTok out loud on their phones in public, I don’t need that coming from a 180 speaker jacket.
(Via Yanko Design)
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