FROM THE TOP HELMUTS BEMS I SONARWORKS
INTERVIEWED BY KATIE KAILUS
HOW DO YOU START YOUR DAY? I don’t have a fixed routine, so there is quite a bit of variance in how I start my day. The most common rou - tine is changing diapers and dressing my 11-month-old daughter, and then warming up her breakfast. I usually skip breakfast myself. If my schedule is not too crazy, I go for a jog. I love a slow start of the day and avoid intellectually heavy tasks in the morning. I leave those for later in the night. WHEN, AND HOW, DID YOU COME TO FOUND SONARWORKS? I don’t come from a music industry background — in fact, I had no relation to the music industry whatsoever apart from a hobby playing some instruments. After start - ing my first business, while still studying at university, I worked for a venture capital fund. In 2012, we (with my co-founder) met an engineer who had made an early prototype of a speaker measurement system. It seemed interesting, but we knew nothing about sound back then. We decided that the only way for us to be sure the technology worked was to ask Grammy award-winning studio engineers. We did a Google search on where to find them, and that brought us to Los Angeles with a one- way ticket. We spent about a month in Los Angeles going from studio to studio and ended up with eight Grammy- awarded engineers who liked our product and became our first users, or beta testers. When we returned home, we knew exactly what had to be built and exactly what was wrong with our product at the time. We fully commit - ted and started building Sonarworks. CAN YOU SHARE WHAT SONARWORKS DOES IN YOUR WORDS FOR READERS WHO MIGHT NOT KNOW? We are a deep-tech company that looks for problems that can be addressed with technology and a data focus. At the moment, we have two main product lines. First, SoundID Reference, a monitoring calibration solution that delivers exactly the same reference sound experience across speakers and headphones. With Reference, any sound system can be digitally calibrated, greatly improv - ing the quality and speed for music makers. Our second product is VoiceAI vocal transformer. It can produce any vocals from a single tool and one vocal input. It can also transform vocals to music instruments and all of that as a fully DAW-based plugin, allowing creators to stay within their workflow.
SEMI-RECENTLY, SONARWORKS ANNOUNCED AN INTEGRATION WITH UNIVERSAL AUDIO’S APOLLO X INTERFACES. HOW HAVE COLLABORATIONS LIKE THESE INFLUENCED SONARWORKS PRODUCT ROADMAP? These collaborations have played a pivotal role in shaping Sonarworks’ product roadmap and overall growth strategy. Our partnerships with industry leaders, like Universal Audio and Adam Audio, validate our core mission — to make accurate sound accessible across ev - ery creator’s workflow, seamlessly and at scale. What these integrations have shown us is that em - bedding Sonarworks technology directly into hardware creates a much smoother user experience, and that’s ex - actly what modern creators expect. These collaborations also help us understand the value of strategic hardware integrations, leading us to prioritize this approach in our roadmap. As a result, we now plan to release at least one major integration, feature or new product each quarter. Refer - ence hardware integrations and our AI-powered voice transformer are currently among our biggest growth driv - ers. These partnerships not only expand our ecosystem but also provide direct insight into user needs, guiding our product development in meaningful ways. In short, they’ve helped accelerate both our innovation cycle and our reach within the professional audio community. VERY COOL. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR MANAGEMENT STYLE? My No. 1 focus is on vision. I try to make absolutely sure everyone understands what the longer-term vision is and what the next steps, or goals, are to get there. I spend a lot of time discussing strategy with managers. From there, I largely trust that we have amazing man - agers and teams, and they’re motivated and intelligent enough to execute better than I would. My task is then to constantly make sure we stay on the right course towards the vision. AS THE MAJORITY OF MUSIC INC. READERS ARE MUSIC OR PRO-AUDIO RETAILERS, HOW CAN THEY GET INVOLVED IN YOUR BUSINESS? We work with retailers and distributors worldwide. Contact Ugis Kampars, ugis.kampars@sonarworks.com, for more information on how to get involved. We also work a lot with hardware product manufacturers to inte - grate our technology directly into other products.
24 I MUSIC INC. I JULY 2025
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