Scrimshaw Jukebox
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
Scrimshaw Jukebox used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate computer game music in a text-based format and created an artifact to play it aloud. The write-up says the music was aimed at matching the quality of the original Secret of Monkey Island. It changes by showing the output can be surprisingly good, prompting questions about whether music composition is a recent new capability of text models.
Why it matters
Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so I tried this: I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the music and build an artifact that can play it out loud - include some example tracks in that artifact I am looking for music of the quality of the original secret of Monkey Island It leaned a lot harder into the Monkey Island theme than I had intended, but the results are surprisingly good. I wonder if the ability to compose competent music is similar to the 3D graphics thing - a new capability for text models that emerged in the past few months? Would need some careful experiments with other recent and not-so-recent models to confirm if this is new or if they've been able to do this for a while. Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, vibe-coding