Musical program auralisation: a structured approach to motif design

摘要

In an earlier paper, Vickers and Alty (2002) showed that musically untrained users could make use of musical cues to understand computing information. Using a technique known as musical program auralisation, they showed that music could communicate run-time and structural information about Pascal programs. This paper describes how a set of hierarchically related auralisation motifs was designed and constructed within a formal musical framework. These auralisations were then evaluated in an experiment to determine how well they could be interpreted by computer science students. The results showed that the musical motifs were generally understood by the subjects and that any prior musical training of the subjects did not affect their ability to interpret the musical signals. Based on the results of the experiment and study of some cognitive aspects of music perception, a set of organising principles for musical program auralisation is proposed. Finally, recommendations for further study are made with particular regard to assessing the usefulness of the auralisations in program debugging situations.