Loony Tunes: Bugs blare in software set to music

Imagine a band playing “Here Comes the Bride” in the middle of a funeral dirge. It would be jarring, to say the least.

Now, British researchers are exploiting the attention-getting effect of musical flubs to highlight errors, or bugs, in computer programs. In a test of a new software-to-music scheme, student programmers found bugs more easily when they listened to melodies representing computer programs than when they used only conventional debugging techniques.