Engram is a sampler that turns broken AI hallucinations into music

Music startup Thoughtful Things has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Engram, a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to manipulate incoming audio and generate experimental, uncanny sounds. Unlike tools such as Suno, Engram is not designed for creating polished, radio-ready songs but rather for pushing AI audio models beyond their intended limits. The device operates entirely offline, running a custom-trained "tiny AI" model locally, with training data sourced only from open, commercially licensed datasets. Founder Evan King describes it as a "field recorder for latent space," drawing inspiration from circuit bending to allow users to tweak and even break the AI models. The company plans to open Engram's firmware so others can load their own custom models. The Kickstarter launch offers a limited run starting at $675, listed as a 30 percent discount off an expected retail price of approximately $850 to $900.

(Source：The Verge)