Amazing new musical debugging technology from a UK university.

[barkmonster]

Here's (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992757) the link to the article on the new scientist website.

I got it from a link on the BT-Network (http://www.bt-network.org/), the write up for it on the BT site was hillarious :

For the hardest of the core.. We have an article from newscientist.com about transposing programming code into music in order to find bugs.. No mention of what happens when you take code designed to create music and feed it into the machine, but when Microsoft used this technique on the Windows source code, the result was the theme song to Barney. Sung by Saddam Hussein.

I have to admit the article isn't going to interest everyone but the write up is pretty funny :D

[Gaz]

I've seen/heard this in action. The Prof Alty was my lecturer a few years ago at loughborough; he gave a demonstration of a bubble sort in music and it was very strange. Nice lecturer thou. It's interesting to see it mentioned now when the technology is at least 2 years old.

gaz

[barkmonster]

Maybe this could lead to some really unique music software/projects coming out of the UK's Universities like soundhack (http://www.soundhack.com/) and supercollider (http://www.audiosynth.com/) in the US.

I wonder if there's somewhere to download examples of what perfect code and buggy code sound like ?

I bet you could work out how to create exact tones and sequences by deliberately inserting mistakes in an application's source code and then recording the result to disk.

[Gaz]

Good code and buggy code doesn't sound much different. It's not like you have a nice tune for the good code and then it picks a note that doesn't fit in the scale for an error. It's very sutle!