Simon Willison’s Weblog
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.
Recent articles
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything - 3rd October 2026
OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog - 29th September 2026
2026 in LLMs (so far) - 27th September 2026
This is a beat by Simon Willison, posted on 6th October 2026 .
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