I Spent My Career Making Sound Heard. Then I Needed to Feel It.

I didn’t set out to invent a blanket.

I was trying to quiet my own mind.

When live events stopped during COVID, my work disappeared almost overnight. I had spent more than a decade building a career around sound. Suddenly, the stages were empty, the equipment was packed away, and I was home wondering what came next.

My mind would not slow down. So I started experimenting.

I installed large vibrating transducers around my apartment. First on the bathtub. Then underneath my mattress. Then inside my couch.

It looked a little ridiculous.

But something about physically feeling those deep frequencies was different from listening through a normal speaker. For me, the sound stopped being something happening around me. It moved through the surface beneath me.

It was direct. Physical.

And, for a moment, my mind began to settle.

That moment changed the direction of my life.

Sound has always been physical to me

I was born and raised in the Bronx and studied Sonic Arts at the City College of New York. I went on to build a career in live and broadcast audio—from touring stages to television studios and private events.

My job was technically about making sure people could hear everything clearly.

But I became just as interested in how people responded to the sound in the room.

Anyone who has stood near a concert subwoofer understands this. Low frequencies do not stop at your ears. You feel them in your chest, through the floor and across your body.

Sound is physical.

For years, I helped create that experience at a massive scale. When my career was interrupted, I started asking whether the same principle could be made personal.

Could you create a full-body sound experience without filling a room with speakers?

Could it be quiet enough to use at home?

Could it feel natural instead of looking like a piece of medical or commercial equipment?

Those questions became an obsession.

From apartment experiments to prototypes

In 2021, I bought a 3D printer and began teaching myself CAD and product design.

I took apart traditional speakers and studied what actually created the physical movement. Then I started rebuilding that mechanism in a form that could be smaller, lighter and flexible enough to live inside fabric.

There were a lot of failed prototypes.

There were wires everywhere. Parts broke. Designs that made sense on a computer did not always make sense once they were placed against the body.

But each version taught me something.

Eventually, those experiments became a system of compact haptic transducers that could be distributed across a blanket. Instead of sound coming from one fixed point, the sensation could move across the body.

That became SoundBlanket.

Why a blanket?

A blanket is familiar.

You do not need a dedicated room, a large piece of furniture or a complicated installation. You can place it over you or underneath you. You can connect your own music, sleep sounds, meditation tracks or any other audio through Bluetooth or an auxiliary cable.

Then you press play.

Eighteen haptic transducers convert that audio into physical sensation across the blanket. You still hear the sound through your headphones or speakers, but now you can feel another dimension of it.

No required app. No subscription. Nothing new to learn.

Just sound made physical.

SoundBlanket is designed and assembled here in the Bronx—the same place where my relationship with sound began.

Why I kept going

The first version started as something I needed.

What kept me building was watching other people experience it.

I began putting prototypes in the hands of strangers, musicians, wellness practitioners and people simply looking for a different way to unwind. The reactions were immediate: surprise, curiosity and often a long pause while they tried to understand what they were feeling.

That pause mattered to me.

It showed me that this was more than an unusual speaker or another piece of sleep technology. It was a new way to experience something people already had a relationship with.

Music. Sound. Rest. Stillness.

I am not interested in turning my personal experience into an exaggerated promise. SoundBlanket is not a cure, and everyone will experience it differently.

I care about building the technology well, understanding the research honestly and being clear about what we know—and what we do not.

This company exists because I believe sound has more potential than we have given it credit for. We have spent generations engineering sound for the ears. I want to explore what becomes possible when we engineer it for the body too.

Why I’m writing this Journal

This Journal will be a record of that work.

I will share the engineering behind SoundBlanket, the prototypes that failed, the science we rely on, what the product does and does not claim, and what we learn from the people using it.

You will also hear from practitioners, customers and other people exploring the space between sound, touch and rest.

I spent my career making sound heard.

Then I reached a point where I needed to feel it.

SoundBlanket grew from that need. I am still pursuing it because I want other people to have the chance to experience it for themselves—and decide what it means to them.

Thanks for being here early.

— Lance Holloway Jr.
Founder, SoundBlanket