This is surprisingly awful, in nearly every dimension. The melodies are approximately random within a given scale, the harmonies are aimless, and the instruments are the cheesiest I've heard in over a decade. There have been numerous algorithmic and automatic and learning composers over the years that are better than this, at least from an aesthetic perspective, or at least on par.
It's a hard problem, but I honestly expected something much more interesting from Wolfram. At the very least someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field.
No doubt this is on the front page because of the previous generative music application posted not long ago on HN. I'll make the same comment here as I did there (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2455023), namely WolframTones tries too hard to emulate human-generated music and ends up sounding awful instead. There is an interesting argument to be made that 'art' attempted to be understood from an analytic viewpoint ("what is the automaton that creates jazz?") loses its meaning while extracting art from mathematics ("I wonder what a random automaton sounds like?") tends to have very interesting results. It seems to be a one-way operation.
Doesn't seem to work for me on Chrome on Mac OS X. I have flashblock but I disabled. According to the FAQ it uses quicktime. I think I might have that disabled.
It's a hard problem, but I honestly expected something much more interesting from Wolfram. At the very least someone making something like this ought to make an effort to understand the current state of the art in the field.