[HN Gopher] Claude Composer
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Claude Composer
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 58 points
Date : 2026-02-04 20:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.josh.ing)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.josh.ing)
| ramon156 wrote:
| > Recently I was listening to music and doing some late night
| vibe coding when I had an idea. I love art and music, but
| unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. So I wondered,
| maybe Claude Code does?
|
| Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If
| you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all.
| Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on
| just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no
| shortcut.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Yeah, it's just weird to expect people to find AI-generated art
| interesting when the person generating it has no unique take or
| talent. This is the worst case where there is absolutely 0
| creativity in the process and the created "art" reflects that
| imo.
| Marha01 wrote:
| I don't find it interesting in an artistic way, but I do find
| it very interesting from an "AI experiment" angle.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| I don't get what the "AI experiment" angle here is? The
| fact that AI can write python code that makes sounds? And
| if the end product isn't interesting or artistically
| worthwhile, what is the point?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or
| artistically worthwhile?
|
| (Most of it isn't.)
|
| Art is on a sliding scale from "Fun study and experiment
| for the sake of it" to "Expresses something personal" to
| "Expresses something collective" to "A cultural landmark
| that invents a completely new expressive language,
| emotionally and technically."
|
| All of those options are creatively worthwhile. Or maybe
| none of them are.
|
| Take your pick.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| > What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or
| artistically worthwhile?
|
| Because it is a human making it, expressing something is
| always worthwhile to the individual on a personal level.
| Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process
| is rewarding to the participant at the very least. Which
| is why a lot of people just find enjoyment in creating
| art even if its not commercially succesful.
|
| But in this case, the criteria changes for the final
| product (the music being produced). It is not
| artistically worthwhile to anyone, not even the creator.
|
| So no, a person with no talent (self claim) using an LLM
| to create art is much less worthwhile than a human being
| with no/any talent creating art on their own at all times
| by default.
| bgirard wrote:
| I like how the author shared the prompt + conversation
| transcripts. I wish OAI / Anthropic would do that when they share
| content demos.
| fassssst wrote:
| Related: ChatGPT Canvas apps can send/receive MIDI in desktop
| Chrome. A little easter egg. You can use it to quickly whip up an
| app that controls GarageBand or Ableton or your op-1 or whatever.
|
| It can also just make sounds with tone.js directly.
| jonathaneunice wrote:
| _Neon Dreams_ is ELO x Daft Punk.
| Marha01 wrote:
| Very interesting experiment! I tried something related half a
| year ago (LLMs writing midi files, musical notation or guitar
| tabs), but directly creating audio with Python and sine waves is
| a pretty original approach.
| josters wrote:
| While the author explicitly wanted Claude to be in the creative
| lead here, I recently also thought about how LLMs could mirror
| their coding abilities in music production workflows, leaving the
| human as the composer and the LLM as the tool-caller.
|
| Especially with Ableton and something like ableton-mcp-
| extended[1] this can go quite far. After adapting it a bit to use
| less tokens for tool call outputs I could get decent performance
| on a local model to tell me what the current device settings on a
| given track were. Imagine this with a more powerful machine and
| things like "make the lead less harsh" or "make the bass bounce"
| set off a chain of automatically added devices with new and
| interesting parameter combinations to adjust to your taste.
|
| In a way this becomes a bit like the inspiration-inducing setting
| of listening to a song which is playing in another room with
| closed doors: by being muffled, certain aspects of the track get
| highlighted which normally wouldn't be perceived as prominently.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/uisato/ableton-mcp-extended
| Flemlord wrote:
| I can't believe AI music hasn't hit the mainstream yet. It's the
| most amazing thing I've seen since my original ChatGPT 3.5 wtf
| experience.
| https://suno.com/playlist/fe6b642c-f4a8-4402-b775-806348640e...
|
| This song was generated from my 2-sentence prompt about a botched
| trash pickup: https://suno.com/s/Bdo9jzngQ4rvQko9
| codethief wrote:
| From the OP:
|
| > For complex AI generated music, tools like Suno and Udio are
| obviously in a different league as they're trained specifically
| on audio and can produce genuinely impressive results. But
| that's not what this experiment was about.
| kypro wrote:
| I agree. It's shockingly good.
|
| It's not just good at producing complete songs though, AI has
| made it trivial to take garbage and make it sound good.
|
| I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the
| top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music
| than you.
|
| I guess it's the same with visual artists. Unless you're
| really, really good it's hard to understand why anyone would
| produce art by hand these days.
| jader201 wrote:
| > _I largely stopped making music because imo unless you 're
| in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write
| better music than you._
|
| It won't be long before this becomes:
|
| > _I largely stopped making _____ because imo unless you 're
| in the top 5% of making _____ AI is probably able to make
| _____ better than you._
|
| Especially where _____ is anything that can be created
| digitally.
| dfltr wrote:
| We make art because humans are compelled to express
| themselves. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not stack
| ranked. Humans make art because, in the words of Pile, "I
| want answers to some questions that I can't speak."
|
| The idea that you'd stop trying to express yourself because
| you're comparing your own artistic voice to the output of an
| LLM and somehow seeing it as less valid, or less worthwhile,
| is just sad.
|
| I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it's genuinely sad for
| you and for all of us as a species.
| 63 wrote:
| There were always musicians who were better than you. If that
| didn't stop you, why did AI? Were you only making music to be
| the best? Surely you knew that was extraordinarily unlikely.
| If you like making music, then make music and like it.
| wrs wrote:
| If the reason you were making music wasn't that you enjoyed
| making music, perhaps stopping is the right choice for you.
| If that _was_ the reason, then AI is irrelevant.
|
| I do enjoy making music, and I don't do it "by hand". I use
| lots of tools (instruments, electronics, a computer for
| recording and mixing, the internet for distribution). As long
| as I'm the one directing the tools, it's still art and it's
| still my music.
| elevatortrim wrote:
| While I'm not against AI music, do not you think there's a
| difference between laying down some beats in ableton with
| your own bass + guitar writing+playing, vs prompting an
| LLM?
| empressplay wrote:
| Yes, because you have your own style. You do things your
| own unique way. That's what makes your music your music.
| wasmainiac wrote:
| Because people don't want to listen to robots. There was a
| radio station here in Norway caught playing AI music to save on
| royalties, it was not good for them.
| Flemlord wrote:
| The concept of AI music is extremely polarizing. One friend I
| played it for got visibly angry. Oddly none of the anti-'s
| were musicians themselves.
| Uehreka wrote:
| > Oddly none of the anti-'s were musicians themselves.
|
| It is clearly plain to anyone who is a musician or hangs
| out with a lot of musicians that the independent music
| world is livid about this stuff. Everyone I've talked to,
| from acoustic songwriters to metal singers to circuit-
| bending pedalheads are united in their absolute hatred of
| this technology.
|
| (Yes, follow-up commenter, I've seen the Timbaland
| interview)
| olivia-banks wrote:
| Perhaps it's your sphere; I know many musicians (mostly
| Jazz and people in punk bands) and they aren't thrilled to
| say the least. Like most things, it's contextual.
| giozaarour wrote:
| it's not art (for humans) if it's not made by a human with a
| human story. AI can be used as the tool with which art is made,
| but not as the maker itself. now, on the other hand, maybe AI
| can make it's own form of art for other AI's to consume.
| However, for the human, the creation of art will always need
| the human taste and story involved
| mbirth wrote:
| You can replace the story with log output, though:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=atcqMWqB3hw
|
| From the author:
|
| > The instrumental and vocals were both generated using Suno
| with a lot fiddling around with the prompts. The video was
| edited by a human in kdenlive :-)
| rafram wrote:
| Music is about the human experience, emotions, mistakes,
| accidents, discoveries.
|
| I could listen to music by real people being vulnerable and
| expressing themselves, or I could listen to a computer
| soullessly regurgitating a stock "blues" melody with inane
| lyrics about a trash can. Why would I ever pick the latter?
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if it has, or is currently in the
| process of, doing so. The results are good enough at this point
| that I think you could probably drop a few songs into a popular
| Spotify playlist and someone who didn't listen too closely
| would be fooled. I assume someone is already doing this.
| lexandstuff wrote:
| It has hit the mainstream imo. Most people are content with the
| amount of music already available.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using
| Claude Code Router, following the author's guide, with two small
| changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or,
| obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech
| tool using Python.
|
| It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which
| cracked me up.
| r2ob wrote:
| https://strudel.cc/
| dandersch wrote:
| Great idea. After telling claude to "make a song" and pointing
| it to the strudel docs, it gave me this: https:
| //strudel.cc/#Ly8gImFtYmVyIGRyaWZ0IiBAYnkgYW1wCi8vIEB2ZXJzaW9uI
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|
| According to claude: It layers a pentatonic
| guitar melody with filter sweep, a saw/triangle bass, warm
| e-piano chords, TR-808 drums, and a sparse music box that
| drifts across the stereo field.
|
| I'm blown away.
|
| I do acknowledge the possiblity that it might be heavily
| plagiarized from an original composition in the training set -
| I wouldn't know.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Oh man I love this so much. The prompts made me laugh so hard.
| Great experiment.
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| We alrrady had Cursor Composer last year, so it sounds like a
| step back.
| viccis wrote:
| >I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent
| whatsoever.
|
| Then go pay someone to teach you to play <instrument>, and you'll
| get a life skill that will be satisfying to watch grow, instead
| of whatever this soulless crap is.
|
| edit: Oh god after listening to those samples, send Claude to the
| same music teacher you choose...
| smuenkel wrote:
| No, I definitely see why people hate on AI music. I appreciate
| that you had fun, but these songs suuuuuck.
|
| Claude is excellent at a few things, decent at quite a few more.
| Art and music are not one of these things.
|
| Ar they good as tools to aid in the creative process if you know
| how to use them and have some restraint? Oh absolutely. As
| replacements for actual art? Oh absolutely not.
|
| Same goes for the entire genre of tools.
| jongjong wrote:
| Making music with AI is a new hobby of mine.
|
| My wife found a Ukulele on the side of the road near where I
| lived a few years ago and took it home. Everytime I had a short
| break, I start just plucking strings, trying to really
| internalize the sound of each note and how they relate... After a
| few months, I learned about Suno and I started uploading short
| tunes and made full songs out of them. I basically produced a
| couple of new songs each week and my Ukulele playing got a lot
| better and I can now do custom chords. I'm all self taught so I
| literally don't know any of the formal rules of music. I shun all
| the theory about chords ans the parts if the lyrics like chorus,
| bridge, outro... I just give the AI the full text and so long as
| the main tune is repeated a few times with appropriate
| variations, I'm fine with it.
|
| TBH, as a software engineer, I was a bit surprised at how rigid
| music is. Isn't it supposed to be creative? Rules stand in the
| way of that. I try to focus purely on what sounds good. For be,
| even the lyrics are just about the sound of hilan voice, I don't
| really care what they say, so long as it makes a vague general
| statement (with multiple interpretations) and not cheesy in any
| way.
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