Ethan Hayden is a composer, performer, and author based in America's Rust Belt. His acoustic, electronic, and vocal music has been performed at conferences, festivals, and DIY spaces around the world, most recently at Ljudbio (Uppsala, Sweden), INTIME (Coventry, UK), Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium (Toronto, ON), and E-Poetry (Buenos Aires). Recent works reflect an ongoing interest in language, phonetics, sound poetry, and micro-durations, as well as more broad explorations of timbre, resonance, and sonic spectra.

Ethan received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Composition from the University at Buffalo. He also holds undergraduate degrees in Composition and Theory from the University of North Texas. His principal teachers have included Cort Lippe, Jeffrey Stadelman, Joseph Klein, Andrew May, and David Bithell. From 2015-2021, Ethan was part of the Digital Music Production faculty at Buffalo State College, where he taught courses in electroacoustic music and directed the Interactive Synthesizer Orchestra.

Ethan is the associate director of Wooden Cities, a Buffalo-based ensemble seeking to help increase the performance of contemporary music in Western New York. With Wooden Cities, he has co-produced more than 40 concerts of new and experimental music across the Midwest. He is also the technical director of Null Point, an initiative for new sound art which emphasizes works by emerging/overlooked artists. As a vocalist and trombonist, he regularly performs contemporary music, sound poetry, and improvisational works. Recent performances have included collaborations with Girilal Baars and Viv Corringham, as well as a performance of Dmitri Kourliandski's Voice-off in the New York Philharmonic's CONTACT! series which The New York Times called "a tour de force performance" and "amazing to hear."

Also active as a writer and researcher on music, Ethan is the author of Sigur Rós's ( ), published as part of Bloomsbury's 33⅓ series. In 2019, he founded Infrasonic Press, an independent record label with the mission of releasing adventurous Rust Belt-based music.