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LYCAY (Let Your Code plAY)
Ilia Malinovsky
Rhythm and music are the earliest and most natural forms of human self-expression; they are also methods of transmission and perception of information. Rhythm and music act not only on the level of consciousness, but also on the one of subconsciousness, creating images. Programming as a kind of art is a process of operating with pure semantic forms, which means the highest level of involvement of consciousness into the creative act.
The main idea of LYCAY project is to use musical accompaniment during programming. This accompaniment corresponds to the meaning of the program so it allows the programmer to look at code in some different ways than usually. Working with music corresponding to the code, programmers will be able to look at the code and algorithms they are creating differently: using not only their consciousness but subconsciousness as well. Thus, programmers will be able to see more accurate and complete picture of what they create, to involve all their feelings into the process of creation, to use their consciousness and subconsciousness. Programmers will be able to open their mind and create something they could never imagine before.
Aesthetic beauty of code will be expressed in music: if the programming code has aesthetic beauty then the music of this code should also sound nice.
The meaning of the program is determined by the flow of instructions and data during runtime of the program. This flow depends on possible values of input parameters so the meaning of the program is determined by execution of the program for all possible values of input parameters.
Programmers are also able to understand the meaning of the program even if they do not mentally interpret/calculate this program for all possible values of all parameters. Moreover, they have some kind of intuitive feeling of the program. To make this intuition clear LYCAY was created.
I use the following mathematical formalisms in LYCAY. Any programming language is organized by its formal grammar. The meaning of the formal grammar is a system of functions dependent on the language’s grammatical rules and atomic rules (i.e. concrete expressions: variable names, variable values and so on). If there are ways to make all grammar rules sound, then the sound of each rule corresponds to the meaning of this rule, so the sound of the whole program corresponds to the meaning of the program too.
The representation of the program in music is achieved by translation of grammatical rules of a programming language (I use java) into the musical phrases.
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This project was comissioned by the software art factory Readme 100 in Dortmund 2005 and is included into the resulting publication: Readme 100 Temporary Software Art Factory, Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, Germany, 2005.
feature about this project: LYCAY (Let Your Code plAY)
project homepage: http://lycay.sourceforge.net/
keywords: intuitive-performance-realtime-musical-open_source-
coding
category: conceptual software
uploaded by o, 16 Feb 2006
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