Aphex Twin’s Samplebrain

Aphex Twin is pretty cool, right? That shouldn’t even be a question, I’ll rephrase it as a statement. Aphex Twin is pretty damn cool.

He’s so cool, that as well as making music since his very early years, he also makes computer programs, or at least designs them. An inspiration is in the world around us..

Shazam started in 2002. They use DSP to listen to sounds and to store the ‘features’ of those sounds. Then you can use Shazam to identify a song, and it will recognise bits of the music as features it already knows and be able to make a fairly good guess about which song you want to identify.

That technology inspired Richard D. James, and some 15 years after Shazam he found someone to help him develop his idea; an audio brain which could be trained with his own material, and requested to recall those sounds by playing it other material. And that’s what Samplebrain does.

Check out the gitlab page for downloading, instructions and a manual.

It’s quite new, and the technology itself might not be easy to initially get your head around with what appear to be unhelpfully labelled knobs like “Novelty” and “Boredom”. Surprisingly, those names are more appropriate than you’d believe.

Anyway, to make things harder for you, I made a DeepDive video exploring this fresh new tool. I think I explain what’s going on, ooookkkkaaayyy. But it’s quite complicated and difficult to talk about without using stupid nerdy sounding words like FFT and BLOCK SIZE, and those words are not as sexy as they sound, to most.

So, watch that, download the thing, throw samples at it, pull sounds out of it, spend some time trying to work out if your life is now richer because of this tool (it probably is), and live your life to the fullest!