Good points about kinesiology and especially the idea that "generic solutions only go so far" when customizing an instrument to a person's particular abilities.
I would be very interested in any ideas for transpositionally invariant fingerings. I started exploring this because of similar work done with the EWI (especially by Bret Pimentel and Curt Sipe).
I also have code I am happy to share (Mathematica / Wolfram Language notebooks).
OK. I have gone through all of the EVI alternate fingerings (the keymapping that I am using) and convinced myself that none have been encoded with "don't care". There really are 25 different ways to play an A in the same octave.
This is great news for people with disabilities, for example. If someone is missing a finger, or incapable of moving it into the right orientation, they might be able find a workaround.
It is also possible to find notes that are one finger (up or down) away from one another. (Hamming distance in the binary representation). These transitions may be easiest for beginners to play. Alternate fingerings may be useful for playing particularly difficult passages if a musician has time to practice, and so on.
I understand. I will try going through all of the EVI fingerings, preceding each one by a different note as specified in the user guide. That way I will be able to tell if there are any "don't care" settings.
By rule-based, I mean that each key (or group of keys) adds or subtracts a particular number of semitones from a base note. (If you check the manual for those two fingerings you will see what I mean). So I don't think there should be any "don't care" options... every one of the 256 possible mappings should be specified by the algorithm, which is how I enumerated them.
But if the programmers just implemented a subset of those and left others as "don't care", then I am wrong.
It could be. I am very new to the Sylphyo and don't already play a wind instrument. I did test each note individually, and usually had to let go all or most of the keys before getting my fingers in the right places.
Also, these two fingerings are built up by rules (not sure if they are implemented that way in the mapping itself).
I wanted complete lists of the alternate fingerings for the EVI and EWI modes, so I wrote a program to generate them. Here are links to PDFs arranged by note and by number (basically the binary representation plus 1).