Vollebak: The Sonic Jacket
Image supplied to Listen Closer.

Vollebak: The Sonic Jacket

Fashion, Technology, Design / 2026

Hold the figure with your mouse or trackpad, or touch and hold. A firm press builds excitement faster where supported. You can also focus the figure and hold Space or Enter. Release to let it settle.

Enter the hangar. Follow the sound.

Listen Closer / Vollebak

Vollebak / An illustrated story

History of the Vollebak

a sound jacketFollow the sound laboratory from the hangar to the jacket.
The Vollebak sound laboratoryA hangar opens onto a studio. A figure wearing a Vollebak shirt, headphones and sunglasses gathers imagined sound scenes, mixes them, and casts a sonic jacket. SONIC MATERIALS LAB VOICES AMONG STONES BREATH, RHYTHM & RITUAL Vollebak THE MOULD VOLLEBAKHEADQUARTERS SOUND RESEARCH & EXPERIMENTATION

Vollebak headquarters

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.

Vollebak’s Sonic Jacket is a white hooded prototype fitted with 180 speakers. They face inward, sending frequencies across the wearer’s torso, arms and head.

The white Sonic Jacket laid flat on a red background, with black speakers and yellow wires across its torso, sleeves and hood.
Image supplied to Listen Closer.

It began with a cat settling on Nick Tidball’s chest.

As Balti purred, Tidball could feel the vibration through his body. He began wondering whether a piece of clothing could produce a sensation like it. The question suited Vollebak, the experimental clothing company he founded with his twin brother Steve in 2015. They had already made a hoodie with a pink-noise soundtrack for rest. This time, Nick wanted to bring the source of the sound into the garment itself.

To build it, Vollebak went to FBFX, a London costume studio whose work includes Dune, The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Its experience putting hardware inside costumes gave the team a place to start. The first tests involved two small panels holding 18 speakers in total. They pressed the panels against different parts of the body, trying frequencies and positions before expanding the idea into a full jacket.

The result has 180 speakers distributed across the torso, sleeves and hood. Each one is 32 millimetres wide, set into a laser-cut opening and pointed towards the wearer. Yellow wires run visibly between them. Pull up the hood and the speakers reach around the head, too.

Close-up of black circular speakers and their yellow connecting wires fitted into the white jacket.
Image supplied to Listen Closer.

The jacket can generate frequencies from 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz. A separate unit holds an MP3 player with ten presets and a dial for adjusting them. A MicroSD card can hold many more; Vollebak is also developing an app to connect to the controls.

In tests, Tidball spoke about feeling frequencies across his chest, arms and back. “Your ears, you realise, are just one tiny part of you,” he told designboom.

For now, the Sonic Jacket is an experiment. Vollebak wants to put it in the hands of artists, musicians, athletes and researchers to see what they do with it. Its possibilities for relaxation, focus and therapy remain questions to explore, rather than settled effects.

A person wearing the white Sonic Jacket with the hood raised in a photography studio.
Image supplied to Listen Closer.

As Vollebak puts it “Maybe you’ll orgasm. Maybe you’ll shit yourself. Maybe you’ll find God…” Balti, presumably, had no idea what he was starting.