Developer spotlight: Sonura
“I can’t imagine a world without music driven by human experience.”
Kindred Salway, CEO and co-founder of the music-technology startup Sonura, launched the company with an ambitious idea: instead of searching through the same sample packs as everyone else, creators should be able to make original sounds shaped around their own ideas. Sonura turns a text description into production-ready audio — music, loops, vocals, one-shots, stems and sound effects — in seconds, and Sonura Flow brings that into the DAW as a plugin on MuseHub.
This is the story of why Sonura was built, how its founders think about AI and consent, and what Sonura Flow does inside a session.
Sonura Flow on MuseHub
In this series we explore the people, ideas and creative philosophies behind the music technology on MuseHub.
Creating sounds that don’t exist yet
Demand for original audio is growing across music, film, games and digital content, but making it still tends to need expensive equipment, specialist knowledge and slow production workflows. The alternative is stock libraries and sample packs — where thousands of creators may be using the same sounds.
“Nobody wants to use the same recycled and mass-produced sounds. We hear the same set of sounds everywhere: from top-40 radio to New Music Friday. Even Grammy award winning songs are starting to share the same sample packs.” — Blue Bookhard, co-founder
Sonura offers a different starting point. You describe what you want in plain language and generate original music, loops, vocals, one-shots and sound effects — in about ten seconds on average, according to the company.
Whether someone is producing a track, scoring a game, designing sound for a film or building a sample library, the aim is the same: shorten the distance between an idea and a finished piece.
Keeping creativity human
Sonura’s goal is not to replace the decisions that make music and sound feel human. Every technical advance in tools has raised the same question about whether creators are being augmented or replaced; the founders’ answer is to extend the creator’s imagination and shrink the technical work between imagining a sound and hearing it. Users stay in control of each stem, layer, texture and detail.
“As producers and artists ourselves, we can’t imagine a world without music driven by human experience.” — Kindred Salway, co-founder
The principle extends beyond Sonura: creative AI is most useful when it helps people express their vision rather than making every decision for them.
A consent-based approach to AI
Generative AI has raised hard questions about training data, artist consent, copyright and commercial ownership. Sonura describes itself as being on the “consent side” of AI music: its models are trained exclusively on licensed material rather than scraped catalogs, and every generated sound comes with royalty-free commercial rights, so creators can release, sell and use their work in professional projects.
For Sonura, responsible AI means supporting both the people using the tools and the artists whose work contributes to the technology behind them.
Meet the founders
Sonura was co-founded by Kindred Salway and Blue Bookhard, combining experience in music technology, production, software, creator marketing and digital platforms.
Kindred Salway — co-founder, CEO
Kindred Salway is a music technologist, producer and engineer with a background in audio and software. After studying music technology, co-founding Bleached and building software for startups, he is now building the technology he imagined during his production career.
Blue Bookhard — co-founder, COO
Blue Bookhard is a creator and marketer with experience across music, technology and major digital platforms. He previously led creator marketing at Snapchat, served as Head of Pop at TIDAL and worked in partner marketing at Google — and came to see music creators as one of the most underserved yet essential parts of the creator economy.
Together they are building Sonura to make professional audio creation faster and more accessible while keeping creators at the centre of the process.
From prompt to production: Sonura Flow
Sonura Flow is the plugin that brings Sonura into the DAW, available on MuseHub in VST3 and AU formats for macOS and Windows.
Inside a session you describe the sound you need and generate up to four variations at once, so you can compare ideas without leaving the timeline. Drag the one you like straight onto a track. Everything you generate is saved to a personal library where it stays searchable and organized for later projects, and each sound carries commercial rights.
Sonura’s mission is to reduce the distance between imagination and audio. The sounds may not exist yet — but making them can take seconds.
Cover photo courtesy of Harry Cockburn at PSEUDO.SILENCE Media.
Next steps
Sonura Flow sits alongside the other AI tools on MuseHub; the best AI plugins puts it in context. If you would rather start from existing material, using loops and beats from MuseHub covers the royalty-free catalog. Get Sonura Flow and the rest in one place — download MuseHub free.