I am the main developer. You are literally right on the time spent...

Our original focus was writing a research paper on hierarchical music generation. Composing a song from an image is just one of the "fun applications" that we spent a little time on, to promote the interestingness of our method. I started Saturday afternoon, and was basically done by Sunday night.

I once developed a hierarchical Markov chain, and I decided to use it to generate fortune cookie wisdom because I thought people would be more willing to overlook grammatical mistakes or be willing to interpret it as an expression of deep truth. http://www.kylem.net/stuff/fortunes.html (You might need to increase the "sense" parameter.)