This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase power dressing.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a cloth that can hear and emit noise.

The team, led by MIT professor Yoel Fink, has reached “a new milestone on the path to functional fibres: Fibres that can detect and produce sound,” MIT said in a statement.

The development, described in the August issue of Nature Materials, transforms the usual passive nature of textiles into a virtually all-singing, all-dancing version.

According to MIT, “applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain”.

The decade-old research project aims to “develop fibres with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment,” MIT said.

The new space-age cloth, it said, can not only listen, but make sound.

“You can actually hear them, these fibres,” Noemie Chocat, part of the lab team, said.