Program Synthesis for Musicians: A Usability Testbed for Temporal Logic Specifications

Abstract

In recent years, program synthesis research has made significant progress in creating user-friendly tools for Programming by example (PBE) and Programming by demonstration (PBD) environments. However, program synthesis from logical specifications, such as reactive synthesis, still faces large challenges in widespread adoption. In order to bring reactive synthesis to a wider audience, more research is necessary to explore different interface options. We present The SynthSynthesizer, a music-based tool for designing and testing specification interfaces. The tool enables researchers to prototype different interfaces for reactive synthesis and run user studies on them. The tool is accessible to both researchers and users by running on a browser on top of a docker-containerized synthesis toolchain. We show sample implementations with the tool by creating dropdown interfaces, and by running a user study with 21 users.