Thoughtful Things has launched a Kickstarter for Engram, a hardware sampler that uses a locally running AI model to warp incoming audio and hallucinate new sounds. Founder Evan King calls it a “field recorder for latent space,” and the device is pitched at musicians who want uncanny, broken textures rather than polished, radio-ready tracks.
Engram is not a cloud-based song generator. It runs a custom, in-house “tiny AI” offline, and the company says its training data comes only from open, commercially licensed sources. The Kickstarter opens with a limited run at $675, which Thoughtful Things says is a 30 percent discount from an expected retail price of $850 to $900.
The company also plans to open Engram’s firmware, letting users tweak the models or load their own. That approach draws on circuit bending—deliberately pushing electronics past their intended limits—and positions the product as a way to explore AI hallucinations rather than hide them.