2018 North West Enterprise Awards

18 SME NEWS / NorthWest Enterprise Awards 2018 With a history stretching back to the first Moon landing, Sonic Age Ltd has been pushing the boundaries insoundinnovationinsome formforalmostfivedecades.Wespoke toFounder John Stuart Reid about howhis company has just created a unique product that is poised tomake its own giant leap, and, in doing this, reshape the entire sound imagingmarket. Award for Innovation in Sound Imaging: CymaScope In 1969, the fledgling company that would later blossom into Sonic Age Ltd soon grew into a family business employing several members of John’s family, including mother, father and elder sister, as well as sales director Ray Scott. Products and services included acoustics consultancy, sound and lighting contracting, high-powered laser displays and pyrotechnics. The company saw many major contracts in its 30-year history, including the installation of the largest sound and lighting system in the UK in Glasgow’s Zanzibar nightclub, in 1985, valued at around £1M in today’s money. Their engineering staff worked on several pavilions in the 1990 Gateshead Garden Festival, including a “Flying Saucer” , and their work on the Northern Electric Pavilion was awarded first prize of the entire festival. But though the company was modestly successful, with sales of around £1M annually, John’s passion for science was not being fulfilled and an event occurred in 1997 that changed everything. On a tour of Egypt, John and his father, George, entered the famous Great Pyramid and its enigmatic King’s Chamber, which is so reverberant you can hear a pin drop. John lay in the chamber’s sarcophagus, a 3.7-ton granite box, and made vocal sounds to casually test its acoustics. But what happened next was as surprising as it was inspirational: he felt every cell in his body tingle, as John explains. “At that point in my career, having worked in the field of acoustics for almost 30 years, I was not prepared for the extraordinary effect that my own vocal sound had on my body. In that moment I sensed that this effect might have NWE18029 Sonic Age Ltd been a designed feature of the pyramid. With that in mind I gained permission to carry out a series of acoustics tests and a few months later I entered the pyramid with an armoury of test equipment. “One of the experiments was designed to test the resonances of the sarcophagus and involved stretching a PVC membrane across its open top and sprinkling on some sand. A speaker excited the membrane with a series of pure sounds. I expected to see, at best, a range of simple geometric patterns in the sand that I hoped would throw some light on my strange experience a few months earlier. But as I bent low over the membrane, watching the sand grains move, they suddenly began to jump up and form into a shape that strongly resembled an ancient , Egyptian hieroglyph. At this point the antiquities inspector became very animated and we began to work as a team, taking photographs and changing the frequency of the tone. With each new sound a different hieroglyphic-like form emerged. In effect each “hieroglyph” in the sand represented a sound made visible, a natural resonance of the sarcophagus. I knew then, within this simple technology, lay the essence of a new type of scientific instrument.” Following the events of 1997 John decided that his future lay in his passion for science and two years later, in 1999, he sold the Sound Electronics trading business and renamed his company Sonic Age Ltd, to begin researching methods of making sound visible. Now, after two