Our friends at Vollebak have taken these ancient ideas and used them in a new kind of transcendental technology. The Sonic Jacket, engineered 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.

 The Sonic Jacket is not the first time sound and frequency have been used to alter the human body and mind. But it’s definitely the first time in history that you can walk around while having 4 Hz to 20,000 Hz fired directly into your body… so we decided to be our own guinea pigs

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.”

Patterned Vibration Pathways

Or read on for a short history of frequency in the human story…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 spiritual imbalance and sound was one route back to alignment. Patterned vibration was the path to group bonding, meaning making and altered states.

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.

Musical Pillars?

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.

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 110Hz, the brain shifts from analytical and verbal focus and 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.

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.

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.

For the Silo, Jarrod Barker.