You might orgasm, you might see God, you might shit yourself.” It’s been a long time since I went out in Camden with this particular trifecta of potential consequences in mind. Yet these are, allegedly, the effects that could await me when I try on Vollebak’s Sonic Jacket in their trendy HQ on Mandela Street, a stone’s throw from Koko and the Blues Kitchen.
This jacket is a “wearable sound field”, crafted with 180 inward-facing speakers, each 32mm across and 10mm deep, that fire frequency directly into the body. They’re mounted in laser-cut holes and generate frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz, delivering sound that you “feel” rather than hear.
The first of its kind, it’s been engineered to shift the wearer’s cognitive and physiological state through sound. We know that sound can make us feel calm, ecstatic, enlightened, and this entirely new form of wearable claims that it can deliver portable, personalised sound therapy to anyone who deigns to put it on.
There to help me zip up this piece of history is Nick Tidball, the designer and athlete who co-founded Vollebak, which makes “clothes from the future”, with his twin brother Steve. This Tidball is an affable fellow who exudes the kind of boundless energy necessary to dream up the bonkers creation that lies before us.
He tells me he was inspired by three things: past civilisations, who were obsessed with sonic frequencies; sonic warfare, and how sonics might be used for good; and his cat purring on his chest at the “bone-healing” frequency of 90Hz. Vollebak built the resulting jacket with FBFX, the special effects studio behind films including Dune and Project Hail Mary. No strangers to space-age design, then.
As for what happens when I try it on? To be honest, I was metaphorically shitting myself before I even arrived. When I put the weighty jacket on and put up the hood, the initial reaction for an anxiety-prone claustrophobe like me is panic. If I had ever experimented with substances I would never confess to trying in these pages, I suspect they’d prompt a similar response.
Bad trips aside, the feeling once any alarm subsides is pretty astounding. You can’t hear a person standing right next to you and feel cocooned in sound, quickly losing any concept of time and space. Certain frequencies feel great, while others feel instinctively wrong, and this reportedly differs entirely from person to person.
“What’s funny is the instantaneity of it,” he says. “Let’s say if someone were to take mushrooms or MDMA, it’s going to take a while to kick in and you can’t turn it off, whereas with this you can immediately turn it off or take it off.”
Tidball’s ambitions for the jacket go beyond mimicking the effect of narcotics, however. The potential therapeutic benefits are vast, as, he predicts, are the scientific discoveries. “I think probably the biggest unlock we’re going to experience over the next 10 years is how we understand consciousness,” he says. “I’m pretty certain everything has a consciousness — the tree, the rock, the atom — it’s just we can’t interact with it.
“I think this technology might unlock different parts of your consciousness and allow you to access them. It might allow you to access flow state, for example, in like two minutes.”
To explore the effects, Tidball wants to share the jacket with artists, creators, musicians and athletes, as well as the scientific community. For now, he’s shared it with me. And though I’m a little sad I didn’t see God, I’m equally relieved that nothing embarrassing happened while I was wearing 180 sonic speakers.
