Engram is a sampler that turns broken AI hallucinations into music

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Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.

Music startup Thoughtful Things has just launched the Kickstarter campaign for its first instrument, Engram. It’s a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to mangle incoming audio and even hallucinate completely new sounds. This isn’t Suno in a box, though. This isn’t a “push-button, get-song” device, aimed at creating something that sounds ready for top-40 radio. It’s about creating experimental, uncanny sounds and pushing AI audio models beyond their limits.

Engram isn’t connected to the internet. Instead, it runs a “tiny AI” locally. According to the Kickstarter listing, the model is designed in-house and custom-trained. The company says:

“We’ve trained our audio models on open datasets that only contain audio licensed for commercial use (CC-BY or similar). We have not trained and will never train...

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