Scrimshaw Jukebox: Testing Claude Opus 5.5's Music Composition

Simon Willison tested whether Claude Opus 5.5 could compose computer game music by prompting it to design a text-based music format and build a playable artifact with example tracks. The model leaned heavily into the Monkey Island theme, but Willison called the results surprisingly good. He wonders whether competent music composition is a newly emerged capability for text models, similar to recent 3D graphics advances.