Samplebrain is described by co-creator Griffiths as a "giant brain that you could feed samples to," and the idea came about around two decades ago according to Richard James, aka Aphex Twin.

James wrote in a blog post of the "custom sample mashing app", "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 added, "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 a cappella’s 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."

James concluded his post by writing, "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."