Have You Listened to Your Program Today?

Assume you could plug a synthesizer into the internals of your computer's CPU, what would you hear? Noise and cacophony would be an intuitive first guess, and probably correct if you would hear the sound in real time. But if we slow down the CPU to approximately 3500 operations per second, we just about might assume the CPU's computation could contain all essential ingredients of music: rhytm and repetition caused by iteration, melodies caused by various mechanisms that change a value incrementally, and harmonies caused by some mechanism of excluding values, such as memory alignment.

Since I wasn't able to open a live CPU without making it slightly disfunctional in the process, I took Valgrind to the rescue: I wrote a little object code instrumentation tool, "skin" as Valgrind authors call them, which logs into a file all values I wish to follow when executing the software with which I wish to have a Close Encounter of the Third Kind. A little more code to generate sound and movies of the values.

Here's what one would here if the bits one to seven in the result of each addition and subtraction would indicate a very short ping. All those bits being zero corresponds to the barely audible 24.5 Hz, or the sub-contra G. Roughly ten highest notes are unfortunately ultrasound, but this was nevertheless the best representation I could come up with.



They say listening daily to your spouse improves your relationship. I wonder whether the same applies to programs.