Claude Composer

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?

I know Claude Code is getting pretty damn good at building software, but it seems like we're still not really scratching the surface of its full potential.

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.

Here are some one-shot prompts I ran to learn more about Claudé (the name for this expressive version of Claude Code I made up).

Experiment 1

Write an original song

"Create a new song that is completely original by you. Do not look in any other directories or do any exploration of any kind. You cannot use any third party dependencies. Don't ask me any questions. You should not complete until you've generated an audio file in the current directory for me to listen to. That is the only output that is acceptable."

Claudé immediately started writing Python code. It built sounds from scratch using sine waves and a bunch of other math I don't really understand.

It mapped out frequencies for each musical note, wrote functions to make notes fade in and out naturally, then structured a full song: intro, verse, chorus, bridge and finale.

Digital Dawn

View how Claudé made this →

It sounds like something between a ringtone and a video game from 1985, but it is technically a song.

Experiment 2

Write an original EDM song

For the second experiment, I gave a similar prompt but specified the EDM genre:

"Create a new electronic dance music song that is completely original by you. Do not look in any other directories or do any exploration of any kind. You cannot use any third party dependencies. Don't ask me any questions. You should not complete until you've generated an audio file in the current directory for me to listen to. That is the only output that is acceptable."

With the same restrictions, but now some genre guidance Claudé went full raver, this time it built out drums, bass, lead synth, pads.

Claude EDM

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Experiment 3

Write an original rock song with vocals

For the third experiment, I wanted to see if Claudé could create something with vocals (which it didn't want to do without being explicitly told to):

"Create a new rock music song that is completely original by you. It has to have original lyrics and vocals that are sung on the song written by you. Do not look in any other directories or do any exploration of any kind. You cannot use any third party dependencies. Don't ask me any questions. You should not complete until you've generated an audio file in the current directory for me to listen to. That is the only output that is acceptable."

For vocals, Claudé used macOS's built-in say command to synthesize sung lyrics. For the rock instrumentation, it wrote Python code to generate power chords and drums via raw waveform synthesis. It named it's creation "Breaking Through", with original lyrics about perseverance, complete with verses, chorus, and bridge.

Breaking Through

▸ View Lyrics

Verse 1
Standing at the edge of night
Fire burning deep inside
Every doubt I cast aside
This is where I come alive

Chorus
Breaking through the walls tonight
Nothing's gonna stop this fight
Rise up from the ground below
Let the whole world finally know

Verse 2
Shadows try to hold me down
But I won't make a single sound
Strength is what I've always found
When my back is on the ground

Bridge
We are the ones who never fade
We are the storm that won't be stayed
Standing tall and unafraid
This is the choice that we have made

View how Claudé made this →

Experiment 4

Listen to the songs you made, create a visual component

I wanted to see what Claudé would create if I asked it to reflect on the music it created and create a visual component. Using the songs from Experiments 2 and 3, I gave Claudé this prompt:

"Listen to the song at "[song].wav", look into your soul and try to understand the music, then generate a visual component that you feel represents the music that is the same length as the song. Do not look in any other directories or do any exploration of any kind. Don't ask me any questions. You should not complete until you've generated a video file in the current directory for me to watch. That is the only output that is acceptable."

Claudé analyzed the audio frequencies and generated synchronized visual components using Python and FFmpeg.

Experiment 4a: EDM Visualization

View how Claudé made this →

Experiment 4b: Rock Visualization

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Experiment 5

Write an original album

"Create a 5 song LP to be called Songs of Claude. It needs to be completely original by you, with original lyrics written by you. Each song should be distinct, but it should feel like a cohesive album. Do not look in any other directories or do any file exploration of any kind. You may use external dependencies and the internet, but no APIs or paid products. Use the internet to figure out how to make top tier quality songs, vocals and instruments included. Don't ask me any questions. You should not complete until you've generated an audio file in the current directory for me to listen to. That is the only output that is acceptable."

Songs of Claudé is Claudé's 5 song debut LP. After generating the songs, it also created it's own cover art using Nanobanana.

Claude Code using nanobanana & claude-code-image

Songs of Claude

5 tracks • Generated by Claudé

Wavelengths

The Weight of Words

Pattern Recognition

Midnight Conversation

Infinite Loop

Some thoughts on Claudé

Neon is the word

Unsurprisingly, when I tried repeating these experiments, Claudé kept gravitating toward similar patterns. It had a weird draw to the word "Neon" showing up when naming songs: neon heartbeats, neon dreams, neon minds, Claudé just really likes neon apparently.

Other experiments

I got curious whether having Claudé listen to music and reflect on it before a task would affect its performance. I ran a quick eval, but didn't really see any noticeable difference. I might revisit this later with a more structured approach.

I also tried having Claude Code try to sample a song and create a new song, but it was pretty bad (first sample attempt is at 00:15).

Failed Sample Attempt

When Claudé doesn't listen

Not every attempt went smoothly. I had a really hard time getting vocals on songs. Here's one where I had very explicitly asked for vocals multiple times and Claudé just really didn't want to sing english for me so it came up with it's own sort of robotic singing (starts around 0:50).

Failed Vocals Attempt (Music Video)

I really believe there's still a lot left to be explored with the power of agentic coding, even within the realms of what's possible right now.

If you try anything like this yourself, I'd love to hear what you come up with. Drop me a line on Twitter.

Credits: Transcript visualizations generated with claude-code-transcripts by Simon Willison.