Simon Willison Tests Claude Opus 5.5's Music Composition Ability
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On October 6, 2026, Simon Willison published a post testing whether Claude Opus 5.5 can compose music. He first asked the model to design a simple text-based music format, then built an artifact capable of audible playback, and asked the model to generate sample tracks referencing the standard of the Secret of Monkey Island soundtrack. The results showed the generated music was unexpectedly good, though the style was clearly skewed toward the Monkey Island theme. Willison speculated that composition ability might be a capability that has newly emerged in text models in recent months, but this speculation has not been verified; he said experiments with other new and older models are needed to confirm it. So far there is only this one report on the event, with no follow-up verification results.
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- Simon WillisonScrimshaw 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.