Engram is a sampler that turns broken AI hallucinations into music

Music startup Thoughtful Things has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Engram, its first hardware instrument. Engram is a sampler and groovebox that uses on-device AI to mangle incoming audio and generate entirely new sounds, including what the company describes as hallucinations. Its small models are deliberately pushed past their limits rather than used to produce polished, radio-ready tracks.

Not a push-button song machine

The device is not aimed at the market served by cloud services such as Suno. Thoughtful Things positions Engram for experimental and uncanny sound design, where glitches and unexpected output are part of the instrument rather than defects to be removed. Engram does not connect to the internet; instead it runs a “tiny AI” model locally, designed in-house and custom-trained by the company.

Trained on licensed audio

According to the Kickstarter listing, the audio models were trained on open datasets that contain only audio licensed for commercial use, such as CC-BY or similar terms. The company stated that it has not trained, and will never train, its models on non-commercial, pirated or otherwise stolen data. Thoughtful Things also plans to open Engram’s firmware so that others can modify it or load their own custom models.

A field recorder for latent space

In the campaign video, founder Evan King speaks the word “piano” to the device, which answers with something glitchy and only vaguely piano-like. King describes Engram as a “field recorder for latent space”, and the design takes inspiration from circuit bending, letting users tweak and even break the underlying models.

Price and availability

Thoughtful Things is offering a limited run of Engrams through the crowdfunding campaign, with pledges starting at $675. The company has not announced a retail price, though it is likely to fall between $850 and $900, since the $675 tier is listed as a 30 percent discount.