Startup launches AI sampler that turns audio glitches into music

Music tech startup Thoughtful Things has launched a Kickstarter campaign for its first hardware instrument, called Engram. The device is a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to distort incoming audio and generate entirely new, hallucinated sounds.

Unlike AI music generators that produce finished, radio-ready songs, Engram is designed for musicians who want raw, experimental textures. The company describes it as a kind of field recorder for AI's latent space, letting users manipulate and circuit-bend small AI models to create unpredictable audio effects rather than polished tracks.