(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998-11)
Vickers, Paul; Alty, James L
Early studies have shown that musical program auralisations can convey structural and run-time information about Turbo Pascal programs to listeners [3, 4, 10]. Auralisations were effected by mapping program events and structures to musical signature tunes, known as motifs. The design of the motifs was based around the taxonomical nature of the Turbo Pascal language constructs [3]. However, it became clear that as the musical complexity and grammatical rigour of the motifs increased, their discernability by the average user decreased. Therefore, from the lessons learnt from our work we propose a set of organising principles for the design and construction of musically-based program auralisations. These organising principles are aimed towards providing accessible auralisations to the average programmer who has no formal musical training.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1997-11)
Alty, James L; Vickers, Paul
Early experiments have suggested that program auralization can convey information about program structure [8]. Languages like Pascal contain classes of construct that are similar in nature allowing hierarchical classification of their features. This taxonomy can be reflected in the design of musical signatures which are used within the CAITLIN program auralization system. Experiments using these hierarchical leitmotifs indicate whether or not their similarities can be put to good use in communicating information about program structure and state. (Note, at time of going to press experimental results could not be included. These will be presented at the conference and included later.)
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1996-11)
Vickers, Paul; Alty, James L
In the field of auditory display relatively little work has focused on the use of sound to aid program debugging. In this paper, we describe CAITLIN , a pre-processor for Turbo Pascal programs that musically auralises programs with a view to assisting novice programmers with locating errors in their code. A discussion follows of an experiment which showed that programmers could use the musical feedback to visualise and describe program structure. We then present conclusions and a discussion of future work.