The Sound of Software: Using Sonification to Aid Comprehension

Program comprehension of unfamiliar software is a daunting task and existing comprehension environments, although helping significantly, do not fully alleviate the information overload involved. The visual medium has been well-explored in aiding software engineers understanding of source code and other artifacts concerned with maintaining existing software systems, but the use of non-visual representations, e.g. sound, has not gone far beyond simple noises to indicate error conditions or attract attention in a running program. This paper aims to explore the program comprehension problems that could usefully be addressed using sound. There are many dimensions to this problem and this paper addresses a new area open program comprehension research, defining the problem space and beginning to populate it with possible solutions. We expect the primary focus of this session to be on software comprehension and sound although many disciplines are likely to become involved in the research that flows from it