Music startup Thoughtful Things has launched a Kickstarter campaign for Engram, its first instrument. The device is a sampler and groovebox that applies AI to incoming audio, mangling it and generating entirely new sounds through hallucination. It is aimed at experimental and uncanny sound design rather than finished, radio-ready tracks.
Engram does not connect to the internet. Instead, it runs a locally hosted "tiny AI" model that Thoughtful Things says was designed in-house and custom-trained. The company says its audio models were trained only on open datasets containing audio licensed for commercial use, such as CC-BY or similar terms. Thoughtful Things states that it has not trained, and will never train, its models on non-commercial, pirated, or otherwise stolen data.
The company also intends to open Engram's firmware so that users can modify it or load their own custom models. In the campaign video, founder Evan King asks the device for "piano" using his voice, and Engram produces something glitchy and only vaguely piano-like. King describes Engram as a field recorder for latent space, framing it as a tool for exploring AI hallucinations and experimental sound design. The instrument draws inspiration from circuit bending, letting users tweak and even break its tiny AI models.
Thoughtful Things is offering a limited run of Engrams through the Kickstarter campaign, starting at $675. The company has not announced a retail price. That $675 pledge is listed as a 30 percent discount, suggesting the eventual retail price is likely to fall between $850 and $900.
The launch places Engram in a different category from push-button AI song generators. It is not positioned as a device that produces music ready for top-40 radio. Instead, it targets users interested in pushing AI audio models past their limits and working with the strange results.
For US buyers, the Kickstarter structure means early backers take on the usual crowdfunding risk, and the $675 pledge is a limited-campaign price rather than a set retail figure. Engram joins a growing field of AI music tools, but its offline, locally trained model and open firmware set it apart from services that rely on cloud processing and commercial song output.
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