Aphex Twin, AKA Richard D. James, and engineer Dave Griffiths have released free sound design software called Samplebrain.
Designed by James and built by Griffiths, the project is described on the website as a "custom sample mashing app." James explained the concept in more detail in a blog post, which you can read in full. This idea 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.
Started thinking 'hmm all this music sitting there, maybe it can be used for something else other than just playing or DJing (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 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, Griffiths described the software as "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." He's the founding director of non-profit Then Try This.
Have a play around with Samplebrain.