Claude Opus 5.5 composes retro game music in Scrimshaw Jukebox test
On his blog, Simon Willison tested whether Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, asking it to first design a simple text-based music format, then build an artifact that plays it aloud with example tracks, aiming for the quality of the original Secret of Monkey Island. The result was "Scrimshaw Jukebox," a pixel-art browser player containing six original adventure-game tracks (Moonlit Harbor, The Ghost Galleon and others), written as plain text and performed by an in-browser synthesizer with a piano-roll score view and editing. Willison called the output "surprisingly good" while noting it leaned harder into the Monkey Island theme than he intended.
Why it matters: It is another anecdotal signal that text models may be gaining non-text creative capabilities, though the author says careful comparisons with other recent and older models are needed to confirm whether this is genuinely new.
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.
How we got here
- Insurers Prepare for AI Agent Liability ClaimsThe Decoder · Anthropic
- Interconnects: open-weight cyber-risk discourse is brokenInterconnects · Anthropic
- Whistleblowers Say AI Researchers Are Checking Work Less OftenThe Information · Anthropic
- TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 publishes AI-focused breakout agendaTechCrunch AI · Anthropic
- Claude Threat Detection Reportedly Leads to Florida ArrestTechRepublic · Anthropic
- Ben's Bites: four kinds of AI users, and why personal agents aren't there yetBen's Bites · Anthropic