Sound glyphs representing inheritance relationships

An auralization technique for representing inheritance relationships in an object-oriented programming language is proposed. The inheritance relationships are represented by inclusion relationships of sound passages, which are called sound glyphs. A prototype system using this technique can assign unique sound glyphs to all classes in Java 2 standard edition version 1.2.2 whose class library has more than 1,500 classes and constitutes a practical class hierarchy. Experiments with three types of sound glyphs were conducted, in which accuracy with one type of sound glyph of about 71 % was obtained, a level more than twice that expected for random answers. This shows that sound glyphs can help one to recognize relationships among classes. Since a sound glyph is transient, we need to use not only the sound glyph but also textual representation in order to understand the meaning of a class. Sound glyphs can be used with visual representations because they have different modalities. The features of sound glyphs are discussed.