Music startup Thoughtful Things has launched the Kickstarter campaign for Engram, its first instrument: a sampler and groovebox that uses tiny AI models running locally to mangle incoming audio and hallucinate completely new sounds from scratch.
Engram is not another Suno-style push-button song generator aimed at creating radio-ready tracks. It is designed specifically for experimental sound design, pushing AI audio models well beyond their normal limits to discover unusual textures. The device runs custom-trained models on open datasets licensed for commercial use, with no internet connection required at any point during operation.
Founder Evan King describes Engram as a field recorder for latent space, capturing the strange sounds that emerge at the edges of model capability. The instrument draws direct inspiration from circuit bending, the practice of physically modifying electronic instruments to create unexpected sounds, allowing users to tweak and even break its tiny AI models in creative ways. In the campaign video, King asks Engram for piano and receives something glitchy and vaguely piano-like, demonstrating the kind of happy accidents the device is built for.
The company plans to open Engram firmware so others can load custom models or modify existing ones. The limited Kickstarter run starts at $675, representing a 30 percent discount from the expected retail price of $850 to $900.
Engram represents a fundamentally different approach to AI music than the automation-focused tools dominating the market. Rather than replacing human creativity, it treats model failure and hallucination as raw creative material, keeping human artists firmly in the loop while expanding the sonic palette available for AI-assisted composition and experimental sound design.