Scrimshaw Jukebox
Simon Willison tested whether Claude Opus 5.5 can compose music: he had it design a simple text-based music format, build a playable artifact, and generate sample tracks benchmarked against the soundtrack quality of Secret of Monkey Island. The results were surprisingly good, though the style leaned heavily Monkey Island. The author speculates that musical composition may be a newly emergent capability of text models in recent months, and says experiments with other new and older models are needed to verify it.