The Instrumental Fingering

Disclaimer:

I do not own a chorded keypad. The current version of the Instrumentation smart phone application does not have a chorded keypad interface. This design will not be relevant until chorded keypads are available.

The fingering patterns described below are, therefore, untested.

Introduction

Instrumentation has a ten finger key space and a direct tabular interface to parts of the vocabulary (Creation, Hypodescription, Articulation, and Specialization).

This design does not cover the rest of the Description layer. The Description layer uses a non-linear addressing strategy designed to emphasize the lath types (as opposed to term indexes) and aid term location recall.

This design shows how the fingers are utilized in pairs as the user drills down through the Table, Sub-table, row, and column levels.

The Method to the Madness

We will be using the Specialization Area  to illustrate the proposed method. You might want to open this link as a separate tab or window so that you can flip back and forth as you read through the following.

The four specialized tables are General, Business, Science, and Applied Arts. These tables can be selected with the pointer and index fingers of the right hand. We select Business with our right index finger.

Within Business, we have the Management, Manufacturing, Finance, and Services Sub-tables. These tables can be selected with the ring and little fingers of the right hand. We select finance with our right ring finger (the right index finger would remain depressed so that Business would remain selected).

Within the Finance Sub-table we have four (horizontal) rows. These rows can be selected with the pointer and index fingers of the left hand.

Within the Finance Sub-table we also have four (vertical) columns. These columns can be selected with the ring and little fingers of the left hand.

We will now show how these pairs of fingers can traverse their available combinations efficiently.

Fiddling the keys

The next section discusses the finger pattern at length, but we are only concerned with the pattern of these pairs of fingers while scanning the available choices within the Table, Sub-table, row, and column levels.

The most obvious pattern (to me) is the binary counting pattern. I illustrate this in the example below. In the Binary column, a one represents a button depressed and a zero is a button released. These states (or rows) show the pointer and index fingers of the right hand and the corresponding four tables of the Specialization Area.

As you can see, counting causes multiple fingers to be moved at the same time. The change from one to two requires that the most significant finger drops while the least significant is raised. The change from three back to zero (as the pattern should be circular) requires that both fingers be raised at once.

In the following table only one finger is moved at a time as the four rows are traversed. The change from two back around to zero also moves just one finger. I also find this pattern easier to traverse backwards (going from zero to two to three, etc.).

This does change the order in which the tables will be viewed, but I haven't thought of a reason why swapping the 'Applied Arts' and 'Science' tables would have any real significance.

Physically the feeling is a rocking motion as you move back and forth between the upper and lower zeros. To see all sixteen sub-tables, the user can combine the upper and lower pairs of fingers. In the four finger pattern, the low order two finger pattern is repeated (forward and then backwards) within each state of the high order two finger pattern, as shown in the table below.

To the Depths and Back again

The standard binary counting pattern may be an inefficient way to traverse the collection of terms found in any block. I've been practicing the Butterfly mnemonic while running through the associated finger positions (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) and it's easy to remember, but I think there is a better pattern.

The reason that this is important is because Instrumentation can be viewed as a collection of banks of sixteen and blocks of 256 (which is 16 X 16) things. If you can run through a group of sixteen contiguous indexes efficiently with one hand, it should be easier to view all of the terms in a sub-table or all of the links in a level of the index when searching for the perfect word.

The chart below shows a series of binary numbers, arranged so that only one bit changes from each state to the next. The "8421" column shows which keys are depressed. You can see that only one finger moves on each transition. I expect that this will speed things up, although I may need a new mnemonic before I can test my hypothesis.

if the "8421" column is taken to be the fingers of the right hand we can also see that the pointer finger (bit 8) and the index finger (bit 4) only change every fourth row (rows 4, 8, 12, and 0). This allows the ring and little fingers (bits 2 and 1) to run forward and backwards through their default states. notice that the pointer and index fingers follow the same default states (00, 01, 11, 10). If more fingers are added this pattern will be repeated with each additional pair.

The "8421" column does not represent the only possible sequence that fulfills the "only move one finger" rule. Since the four sub-columns of bits can be swapped around, there should be 24 (or 6! [factorial]) possible orders (such as 1248, 8241, etc.). Also, the pattern is circular so you can start at any point and move in either direction and you will still cover all of the combinations in the same number of steps.

This means that there are (24 X 16 X 2 =) 768 possible progressions. I haven't looked at all the progressions to see if any of them are duplicates, but I imagine a few might be.

I chose the sequence above for expositional reasons. The "1" sub-column changes twice as often as the "2" sub-column which changes twice as often as the "4" sub-column which changes twice as often as the "8" sub-column. This make the pattern much easier to discern.

None of this, however, makes the pattern above the best pattern for an efficient and mnemonic human chord progression. Much testing is needed.