Despite being a programmer by trade and a musician by hobby, I never would have conceived of this project to use musical cues to represent structural elements in computer programs. The idea is to create auditory clues to how a program is executing so the programmer can actually hear the logic progress. Not surprisingly, “false” statements use a minor key, while “true” is major. The system, dubbed Caitlin, was Paul Vickers’ PhD project which is available online, including the contents of the accompanying audio CD. The hope is that bugs in programs can be more easily located through auditory means. Their experiments showed that the added sound did help undergraduate computer science students with debugging. I’m not sure how it would work for more complex systems, with multithreading and other asynchronous event handling, but I suppose problems could be broken down into smaller trains of logic which can then be debugged with aural help. It’s an intriguing concept.