Ai/Ml on Evan King

Engram: Generative audio sampler

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I’m launching the Engram, a hardware sampler that generates new sounds in real-time using embedded generative audio models. It combines traditional sampling with voice control and audio “model bending”, giving musicians new ways to explore and create unique sounds.

Contact me or sign up as a tester to help shape Engram’s future. EDIT: The call for testers is now closed.

How do we make AI art less boring?

People have mixed feelings about AI. Everyone I talk to – from engineers to physicians to artists – agrees on one thing: AI changes their relationship with their labor. The response to this, however, varies quite a bit. This ambivalence is most apparent in creative fields, where AI boosters are selling the ability to generate whole books, movies, albums, and works of visual art from a few prompts. From an efficiency perspective, this is optimal. But art has never been about efficiency: it’s about history, the artist’s abilities and limits, and the artistic process. Many artists are responding to these efficiency promises with rightful animus and distrust. The artists, in fact, are not the customer. Their bosses are.

Mishearings: Turning ASR models into poets

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I built a tool for assembling Dadaist poems from ASR transcriptions of misheard speech, and you can play with it in your web browser. I built it with my MoonshineJS library, Tone.js, and p5js.

Introduction

My goal lately has been to build a JS library for simple on-device speech recognition in web applications. While there are many practical uses for this, I felt the urge recently to explore its creative potential. Speech recognition models are a bit more utilitarian than purely generative models – you put speech in and get text out – so I had my work cut out for me.

A private ambient summarizer device

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An ePaper display shows the most common words overheard from nearby conversations.

I wrapped up my PhD recently. It’s in “Electrical and Computer Engineering”, though it’s more descriptive to say that I spent my four years of graduate school working in “Ubiquitous Computing” or ubicomp. Ubicomp researchers aim to make technology that “fit[s] the human environment” rather than forcing humans to adapt themselves to environments dominated by obtrusive technology. Established by the late Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the early nineties, ubicomp has philosophical roots: Weiser was strongly influenced by the idea of “entanglement”, which suggests that humans are inextricably linked to (and influenced by) their surroundings.

Moonshine: Industry-leading edge ASR

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Moonshine outperforms speech-to-text models from OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, and Meta on the OpenASR Leaderboard while running 5x faster¹ on edge devices.

I built the data collection and preprocessing pipelines that we used to train Moonshine, delivering over 200K hours of labeled data. We needed a LOT of good data, and we had to move fast. The pipeline I constructed was massively distributed, allowing us to intake hundreds of terabytes of raw audio data, label it, and clean it within the span of several weeks.

Teaching things to think

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What if smart devices could reason about their state, like a thermostat that explains its schedule, or a light bulb that chooses a color to suit a mood?

That’s the subject of my IEEE PerCom ‘25 paper, “Teaching Things To Think: Bootstrapping Local Reasoning for Smart(er) Devices”. We proposed a method for synthesizing training data to distill small language models for the task, leveraging a combination of formal methods and generative models. We ultimately trained and evaluated models for two “thoughtful things” – a lamp and a thermostat – then evaluated their performance at explaining and mutating their state in response to unconstrained user commands.

Sasha: Introducing LLMs for smart spaces

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Building on my weekend project to control some smart lights with ChatGPT, this wide-ranging paper fully introduces LLM-based reasoning to multi-device smart home environments. We introduce methods and benchmarks for measuring model performance at reasoning in smart homes, propose methods for engineering immediate and scheduled responses to user goals, propose a multi-step reasoning system for improving system performance, and conduct the first user study of a real LLM-controlled smart home.

Something that often gets lost in a research paper is the truly fun and challenging experiences you can have with the work. Between touring a trailer on the UT Austin JJ Pickle Campus to see if I could turn it into a smart home (I could not – it was outfitted with extremely sensitive equipment for conducting ventilation studies) to eventually hauling pegboard and furniture from my illegally-parked RAV4 up to an unused lab on the 7th floor of the EER building, this project was truly the highlight of my PhD.

Using LLMs to control a smart home

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2024 UPDATE

I originally authored this post in early 2023 — little did I know it would be the spark of a broader research project, ultimately becoming a significant part of my PhD dissertation. If you are the researchy type, you can read the short 2023 preprint paper and/or the in-depth 2024 ACM IMWUT paper I published and presented at UbiComp 2024 about this topic. We also made a demo video that shows an LLM-based smart home in action. Otherwise, enjoy the original post!

My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread” is a cozy, hazy art-pop exploration of the interplay between everyday human life and the natural world. I released this EP as Olivia Nowadays in 2022 along with my friend and collaborator, Kent Carson.

Blending field recordings with lush instrumentation, warm rhythms, and lyrics imbued with the whimsy of magical realism, the five songs on MPAHOBAT dip in and out of the experiences of different people, animals, and automatons to explore this fraught relationship between human lifestyles and nature.