2026-10-06 15:17 UTCOriginal source1 min readUpdated: 2026-10-06 15:46 UTC

Scrimshaw Jukebox

Summary

Simon Willison tested whether Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music by asking it to define a simple text-based music format and build an artifact that plays example tracks. The result, Scrimshaw Jukebox, is a browser-based pixel-art player with six surprisingly good adventure-game tracks. Willison wonders whether competent music composition is a newly emergent text-model capability, similar to recent 3D generation, and says cross-model experiments are needed.

SourceSimon Willison's Weblog

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Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox

Simon Willison’s Weblog

6th October 2026

Tool

Scrimshaw Jukebox

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.

Article intelligence

EngineersIntermediate

Key points

Simon Willison asked Claude Opus 5.5 to design a simple text format for game music and build a playable artifact with example tracks.
The resulting Scrimshaw Jukebox is a retro pixel-art browser player with six original adventure-game tracks written as plain text and editable via a score view.
The output leaned heavily into a Monkey Island-style theme, but Willison found the quality surprisingly good.
He speculates that competent AI music composition may be a recently emerged capability for text models and calls for careful experiments across recent and older models.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.

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Key points

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