Program auralization: Author's comments on Vickers and Alty, ICAD 2000

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we reflect upon the investigations into external auditory representations of programs (program auralization) reported by Vickers and Alty at ICAD 2000. First, we place the work in its historical and thematic context and explore the motivation that lay behind it. We then outline the process by which we got to the stage of being able to report empirical results in 2000 and compare the work with that done by other researchers in the field. Finally, we assess the major contribution that this work made to the field of auditory display and look to the future outlining the work still to be done since the paper was first published (we also look at work done by others in this area since 2000).

REFERENCES

• 1: James L. Alty, Can we use music in computer-human communication?, Proceedings of the HCI'95 conference on People and computers X, p.409-423, April 1996, Huddersfield, United Kingdom
• 2: Alty, J. L. and Vickers, P. 1997. The CAITLIN auralization system: Hierarchical leitmotif design as a clue to program comprehension. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD '97). Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA. 89--96.
• 3: Bock, D. S. 1994. ADSL: An auditory domain specification language for program auralization. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD '94), G. Kramer and S. Smith, Eds. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM. 251--256.
• 4: Dale Sebastian Bock, Auditory software fault diagnosis using a sound domain specification language, 1995
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• 8: Jameson, D. H. 1994. Sonnet: Audio-enhanced monitoring and debugging. In Auditory Display, G. Kramer, Ed. Vol. XVIII. Santa Fe Institute, Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. 253--265.
• 9: Donald E. Knuth, Literate programming, The Computer Journal, v.27 n.2, p.97-111, May 1984 [doi>10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97]
• 10: Mathur, A. P., Boardman, D. B., and Khandelwal, V. 1994. LSL: A specification language for program auralization. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD '94), G. Kramer and S. Smith, Eds. Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM. 257--264.
• 11: Pablo Romero , Richard Cox , Benedict du Boulay , Rudi Lutz, Visual Attention and Representation Switching During Java Program Debugging: A Study Using the Restricted Focus Viewer, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Diagrammatic Representation and Inference, p.221-235, April 18-20, 2002
• 12: Sonnenwald, D. H., Gopinath, B., Haberman, G. O., Keese, William M, I., and Myers, J. S. 1990. Infosound: An audio aid to program comprehension. In 23rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Vol. 11. IEEE Computer Society Press, 541--546.
• 13: Vickers, P. 2004. External auditory representations of programs: Past, present, and future---an aesthetic perspective. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2004), S. Barrass and P. Vickers, Eds. ICAD, Sydney.
• 14: Vickers, P. and Alty, J. L. 1996. CAITLIN: A musical program auralization tool to assist novice programmers with debugging. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD '96), S. P. Frysinger and G. Kramer, Eds. Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA. 17--24.
• 15: Vickers, P. and Alty, J. L. 1998. Towards some organising principles for musical program auralization. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD '98), S. A. Brewster and A. D. N. Edwards, Eds. Electronic Workshops in Computing. British Computer Society, Glasgow.
• 16: Vickers, P. and Alty, J. L. 2002a. Using music to communicate computing information. Interacting with Computers 14, 5, 435--456.
• 17: Vickers, P. and Alty, J. L. 2002b. When bugs sing. Interacting with Computers 14, 6, 793--819.
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• 19: Vickers, P. and Alty, J. L. 2006. The well-tempered compiler: The aesthetics of program auralization. In Aesthetic Computing, P. Fishwick, Ed. MIT Press, Boston, MA. Chapter 11, in press.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Auditory (non-speech) feedback

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Audio input/output
      H.5.5 Sound and Music Computing
          Subjects: Methodologies and techniques

General Terms:
Human Factors, Languages

Keywords:
Music, Pascal, auralization, debugging