Aphex Twin, AKA Richard D. James, has unveiled a free sound design software programme called Samplebrain.
Designed by James and built by engineer Dave Griffiths, the software is described as a "custom sample mashing app." In a detailed blog post about the project, James said the initial idea for it "came about a long time ago, not sure exactly when, 2002-ish, but when MP3s started to become a thing, when for the first time there were a ton of them sitting on my hard drive and the brilliant Shazam had recently launched."
His explanation about the software continued: "Started thinking, ‘Hmm, all this music sitting there, maybe it can be used for something else other than just playing or DJing’. I had originally contacted the founders of Shazam to discuss further creative uses of their genius idea but they were busy making an automatic DJ programme. I still think Shazam could be re-purposed for something incredible, but in the meantime we have Samplebrain.
"What if you could reconstruct source audio from a selection of other MP3s/audio on your computer? What if you could build a 303 riff from only acapellas or bubbling mud sounds? What if you could sing a silly tune and rebuild it from classical music files?
"You can do this with Samplebrain. We soon realised after Dave had started to get things going that with a few cheaty sliders you could actually re-make anything from just one source file, so the options are all there to play with. Since funding this project I seemed to have found very little time to explore it properly and the time has now come to let you lot have a fiddle with it too."
In a separate post about the project, Griffiths said: "Richard mentioned an idea he had about something like a giant brain that you could feed samples to. If you gave it enough, it would be able to take all the right bits to recreate a new sound you fed it."
You can experiment with the programme for yourself here.
