inside vollebak's new sonic jacket, a resonant chamber for the body
inside vollebak's sonic jacket, an emotional resonance chamber for the body<br>technology connections: +370
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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...