Researchers at MIT have just given new meaning to the term “wearing a wire.” They’ve made a new acoustic fiber out of a certain kind of plastic that’s normally used in microphones. This means that someday you could wear a shirt made of these threads, and the whole thing would pick up sound, functioning as a wearable microphone.

It gets weirder. Scientists say such a material might also act like the opposite of a piezoelectric substance, with movement generating electricity rather than the other way around. So not only can this stuff pick up all the sounds around you, it could help charge up your phone at the same time. It’s also capable of making tiny sounds. The scientists say it could be used as a wearable microphone, a biological sensor, or woven into undersea nets to monitor water flow.

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