Hayden Housen
| Hayden Housen | |
| Occupation | Co-founder and CTO of Sonauto |
|---|---|
| Known for | Sonauto, AI music editor |
| Education | Cornell University (Computer Science) |
Hayden Housen is an American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Sonauto, an artificial intelligence music editor that converts prompts, lyrics, or melodies into full songs in any style. Sonauto participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch.[1]
Early life and education
Housen studied computer science at Cornell University. While a freshman at Cornell, he co-authored research on paraphrase identification with Dr. Ser-Nam Lim, which was published at the NeurIPS 2022 conference. As a sophomore, he conducted research on unsupervised object discovery with Dr. Kevin Ellis. Prior to university, Housen attended Somers High School, where he researched automatic classroom lecture summarization using AI and deep learning. He also developed a neural text summarization system that gained over 430 stars on GitHub.[2]
Career
Before co-founding Sonauto, Housen held software engineering internships at multiple technology companies. He interned at Vocode (YC W23), a developer platform for voice AI, where he worked on the company's FastAPI backend and dashboard. He also interned on the machine learning team at Ada, a customer service automation company, where he reportedly improved intent-classification accuracy by 8 percent using a small fraction of production data.
Housen co-founded Sonauto alongside Ryan Tremblay. The company, based in San Francisco, develops an AI-powered music editing platform that allows users to generate complete songs from text prompts, written lyrics, or hummed melodies. The platform supports a range of musical styles; for example, the company describes a use case in which a user can create an original birthday song performed in the style of Frank Sinatra within minutes.[3] Sonauto was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and has attracted attention in the AI-generated music space, including international press coverage.
In addition to his professional work, Housen has published guides for cybersecurity challenges and has participated in the Advent of Code programming competition annually for over six years.
References
- ↑ "Sonauto – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Hayden Housen". 'haydenhousen.com}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ "Sonauto". 'Sonauto}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.