Scrimshaw Jukebox

Simon Willison has described Scrimshaw Jukebox, a tool he built after asking Claude Opus 5.5 to compose computer game music. According to his account, he asked the model to design a simple text-based format for the music and to build an artifact that could play it out loud, including example tracks in that artifact. He said he was looking for music of the quality of the original Secret of Monkey Island.

Willison wrote that the output leaned a lot harder into the Monkey Island theme than he had intended, but that the results were surprisingly good.

He raised an open question about whether the ability to compose competent music is similar to what he called the 3D graphics thing, describing it as a new capability for text models that emerged in the past few months. He wrote that confirming whether this is new, or whether such models have been able to do it for a while, would require careful experiments with other recent and not-so-recent models.

The post was tagged ai, generative-ai, llms, claude and vibe-coding.