Program Visualisation for Visual Programs

The Nord Modular music synthesiser system comprises a stand-alone array of digital signal processors programmed by a dataflow visual langauage and supported by a visual programming environment that runs on commodity hardware. We have investigated applying program visualisation techniques to over 400 Nord Modular programs. Our visualisations make explicit module types and signal flows that are only implicit in the metaphorical graphical syntax adopted by the Nord Modular visual programming language. We have also analysed the programming style used in Nord Modular programs, in particular, the direction of program layouts. While we found that programs tended to arrange signal flow top down and left to right, we found much more variation than we expected, both within individual programs and across the Nord factory program corpus.

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