This new fabric can capture sounds from the environment. Able to hear sounds, such materials could provide a comfy — and perhaps trendy — way to monitor body functions or aid with hearing.

Fink Lab/MIT, Elizabeth Meiklejohn/RISD

Someday, our clothes may eavesdrop on the soundtrack of our lives.

A new fiber acts as a microphone. It can pick up speech, rustling leaves — even chirping birds. It then turns those acoustic signals into electrical ones. Woven into fabric, these fibers can hear handclaps and faint sounds. They can even catch the beating of its wearer’s heart, researchers report March 16 in Nature.

Fabrics containing these fibers might become an easy, comfy — and maybe trendy — way to listen to our organs or to aid hearing.

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Cloth that interacts with sounds has existed for perhaps hundreds of years, says Wei Yan. He worked on the fabric while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, in Cambridge. As a materials scientist, he uses physics and chemistry to investigate and design materials.

Fabrics have usually been used to muffle sound, notes Yan, who now works at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Using fabric instead as a microphone, he says, is “totally a different concept.”

The new research was inspired by the human eardrum, Yan says. Sound waves cause the eardrum to vibrate. The ear’s cochlea (KOAK-lee-uh) converts those vibrations into electrical signals. “It turns out that this eardrum is made of fibers,” notes materials scientist Yoel Fink. He was part of the MIT team that spun up the new fabric.

Fibers in the eardrum’s inner layers crisscross. Some extend out from the eardrum’s center. Others form circles. Made of the protein collagen, those fibers help people hear. Their arrangement, Fink says, resembles the fabrics people weave.

Similar to what it does to the eardrum, sound vibrates fabric. The new fabric contains cotton fibers and others made of a stiff material called Twaron. That combination of threads helps turn the energy from sounds into vibrations. But the cloth also includes a special fiber. It contains a blend of piezoelectric materials. Such materials produce a voltage when pressed or bent. Tiny buckles and bends of the piezoelectric fiber create electrical signals. Those signals can be sent to a device that reads and records the voltage.

The fabric microphone works at a range of sound levels. It can sense the difference between a quiet library and heavy traffic, the team reports. The researchers are still working to use computer software to help detangle the sounds they want to hear from a backdrop of noise. When woven into clothing, the sound-sensing fabric feels like regular fabric, Yan says. In tests, it continued to work as a microphone even after going through the wash 10 times.

Piezoelectric materials have “huge potential” for applications, says Vijay Thakur. A materials scientist, he works at Scotland’s Rural College in Edinburgh and did not play a role in developing the new fabric.

People have explored piezoelectric materials to generate energy from vibrations. But those materials have been limited by the very small voltages they produce. The way the new special fibers are made overcomes this challenge, he says. Their outer layer is super stretchy and flexible. It doesn’t take much energy to bend them. That concentrates the energy from vibrations into the piezoelectric layer. This makes the microphone more sensitive, says Thakur, who was not involved in the research.

As a proof of concept, the team wove their fabric microphone into a shirt. Like a stethoscope, it could hear its wearer’s heartbeat. “This is really inspiring,” says Yogendra Mishra, who also was not involved in the new work. A materials engineer, he works at the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg. With a fiber mounted near the heart, this shirt could reliably measure someone’s heart rate.

It also could hear sound signatures of certain heart valves closing, the authors report. Used this way, the fabric microphone might listen for murmurs. Those are unusual sounds that can point to something wrong with how the heart is working.

Thakur says the fabric may someday be able to provide similar information as an echocardiogram (Ek-oh-KAR-dee-oh-gram). Such sensors use sound waves to image the heart. If shown to work for monitoring the body and for diagnosing disease, listening fabrics might find use in the clothes of young kids. Such apparel could make it easier to track heart conditions in little ones who have trouble staying still, he says.

The team also anticipates that the fabric microphone could help people who have trouble hearing. It might both amplify sound and help people detect a sound’s direction. To test this, Yan and his colleagues made a shirt with two sound-sensing fibers on its back. These fibers could detect the direction a clap came from. Because the two fibers were spaced apart, there was a small difference in when each picked up the sound.

And when hooked up to a power source, fabric made with the new fibers can even broadcast sound, acting as a speaker. Voltage signals sent to the fabric cause vibrations that make audible sounds.

“For the past 20 years, we’ve been trying to introduce a new way of thinking about fabrics,” says Fink at MIT. Fabrics have long provided beauty and warmth, but they can do more. They may help solve some acoustic problems. And perhaps, Fink says, they can beautify technology too.

This is one in a series presenting news on technology and innovation, made possible with generous support from the Lemelson Foundation.

acoustic: Having to do with sound or hearing.

amplify: To increase in number, volume or other measure of responsiveness.

audible: Something that can be heard, usually with ears or other sound-sensing structures.

broadcast: To cast — or send out — something over a relatively large distance. A loudspeaker may send sounds out over a great distance. An electronic transmitter may emit electromagnetic signals over the air to a distant radio, television or other receiving device. And a newscaster can broadcast details of events to listeners across a large area, even the world.

chemistry: The field of science that deals with the composition, structure and properties of substances and how they interact. Scientists use this knowledge to study unfamiliar substances, to reproduce large quantities of useful substances or to design and create new and useful substances.

collagen: A fibrous protein found in bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues.

colleague: Someone who works with another; a co-worker or team member.

engineer: A person who uses science to solve problems. As a verb, to engineer means to design a device, material or process that will solve some problem or unmet need. (v.) To perform these tasks, or the name for a person who performs such tasks.

fabric: Any flexible material that is woven, knitted or can be fused into a sheet by heat.

fiber: Something whose shape resembles a thread or filament. (in nutrition) Components of many fibrous plant-based foods. These so-called non-digestible fibers tend to come from cellulose, lignin, and pectin — all plant constituents that resist breakdown by the body’s digestive enzymes.

heart rate: Heart beat; the number of times per minute that the heart — a pump — contracts, moving blood throughout the body.

materials scientist: A researcher who studies how the atomic and molecular structure of a material is related to its overall properties. Materials scientists can design new materials or analyze existing ones. Their analyses of a material’s overall properties (such as density, strength and melting point) can help engineers and other researchers select materials that are best suited to a new application.

organ: (in biology) Various parts of an organism that perform one or more particular functions. For instance, an ovary is an organ that makes eggs, the brain is an organ that makes sense of nerve signals and a plant’s roots are organs that take in nutrients and moisture.

physics: The scientific study of the nature and properties of matter and energy. Classical physics is an explanation of the nature and properties of matter and energy that relies on descriptions such as Newton’s laws of motion. Quantum physics, a field of study that emerged later, is a more accurate way of explaining the motions and behavior of matter. A scientist who works in such areas is known as a physicist.

piezoelectric: An adjective describing the ability of certain materials (such as crystals) to develop an electric voltage when deformed, or squeezed.

protein: A compound made from one or more long chains of amino acids. Proteins are an essential part of all living organisms. They form the basis of living cells, muscle and tissues; they also do the work inside of cells. Among the better-known, stand-alone proteins are the hemoglobin (in blood) and the antibodies (also in blood) that attempt to fight infections. Medicines frequently work by latching onto proteins.

range: The full extent or distribution of something. For instance, a plant or animal’s range is the area over which it naturally exists.

Singapore: An island nation located just off the tip of Malaysia in southeast Asia. Formerly an English colony, it became an independent nation in 1965. Its roughly 55 islands (the largest is Singapore) comprise some 687 square kilometers (265 square miles) of land, and are home to more than 5.3 million people.

sound wave: A wave that transmits sound. Sound waves have alternating swaths of high and low pressure.

technology: The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry — or the devices, processes and systems that result from those efforts.

valve: Something that can reduce or shut off the flow of some gas or liquid through a pipe or other passageway. Some specialized valves may allow a liquid or gas to flow in one direction only.

vibrate: To rhythmically shake or to move continuously and rapidly back and forth.

voltage: A force associated with an electric current that is measured in units known as volts. Power companies use high-voltage to move electric power over long distances.

wave: A disturbance or variation that travels through space and matter in a regular, oscillating fashion.

Journal:​ W. Yan et al. Single fibre enables acoustic fabrics via nanometre-scale vibrations. Nature. Vol. 603, March 16, 2022, p. 616. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04476-9.

Carolyn Wilke is a former staff writer at Science News for Students. She has a Ph.D. in environmental engineering. Carolyn enjoys writing about chemistry, microbes and the environment. She also loves playing with her cat.

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