If you’re over the wave of soulless, prompt-to-song AI generators, meet Engram. It’s the latest project from the music startup Thoughtful Things, and it’s lowkey the weirdest piece of gear to hit Kickstarter this year. Instead of trying to mimic a radio-ready hit, Engram is essentially a 'field recorder for latent space'—meaning it's built to take your audio and completely mangle it using local, tiny AI models.
Not your average AI
Unlike those massive cloud-based models that demand an internet connection, Engram runs its tech entirely offline. Founder Evan King is leaning hard into the 'circuit bending' aesthetic, basically encouraging you to break the AI and see what kind of uncanny, glitchy sounds come out the other side. In their demo, you can feed it a simple voice prompt like 'piano,' and instead of a clean, MIDI-style sound, it spits out something way more experimental and distorted.
Worried about the ethics? The team says they only trained their models on commercially licensed datasets, swearing off the stolen or pirated content that keeps the vibes off for most creators. Plus, they’re planning to open up the firmware, so the nerds among us can load in custom models and really make the thing their own.
The cost of the glitch
If you want to grab one, the Kickstarter is live right now with units starting at $675. That’s supposedly a 30 percent discount, which puts the eventual retail price somewhere in the $850 to $900 range. It’s definitely an investment for the experimental producers out there.
Why it matters
Most AI tools right now are trying to make things 'perfect' or 'easy,' which is honestly pretty boring. Engram is flipping the script by focusing on the chaos and the flaws of AI. It’s about taking the tech and using it as an instrument to create textures you can’t get anywhere else, which is a total W for anyone tired of the standard AI-generated sound.
