Aphex Twin, aka Richard David James, is known for making glitchy music that resembles something of a sonic collage. Now he wants to help others do the same. He and engineer Dave Griffiths have made Samplebrain, a newly launched piece of sound design software.
The project has been in the works for about 20 years. In a statement on Warp’s Instagram, James wrote, “This idea came about a long time ago, not sure exactly when, 2002 ish, but when mp3’s 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.”
He continued, “Started thinking hmm all this music sitting there, maybe it can be used for something else other than just playing or dj’ing [hi Atomixmp3 & rudimentary max/msp patches]. 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 program, 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 mp3’s/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.”
Find the app here.