Keyboard mapping

 

The first ver­sion of the Bol Processor (BP1) was an advanced word proces­sor designed to store text rep­re­sen­ta­tions of musi­cal vari­a­tions cre­at­ed by Indian drum play­ers. This work required a map­ping sys­tem that could asso­ciate a word with a sin­gle key on the com­put­er keyboard.

Although the key­board map­ping was rel­a­tive­ly easy to pro­gram in the Apple II's 6502 assem­bly lan­guage, its imple­men­ta­tion in BP2 and then BP3 was delayed until ver­sion 3.4.4 (May 2026). Thus, after many years, the entire tech­ni­cal envi­ron­ment for the study of drum impro­vi­sa­tion has been revived, along­side the restored pro­ce­dures of item pars­ing and learn­ing rule weights from exam­ples.

Checking keyboard mapping on BP3

Open "-gr.dhadhatite" (in the lat­est dis­tri­b­u­tion of the "ctests" fold­er). On top of the gram­mar you can read:

-se.dhadhatite
-al.dhadhatite
-wg.dhadhatite
-da.dhadhatite
-kb.dhadhatite

The "-kb.dhadhatite" dec­la­ra­tion points to a file con­tain­ing the key­board map­ping. If this file is present in the "ctests" fold­er, a but­ton appears below the gram­mar to open it. If no file with this name is found, you will be offered the option of cre­at­ing a new one.

The dis­play is self-explanatory:

The map­ping involves the asso­ci­a­tion of alpha­bet­ic keys with any word (or sequence of words). Here we use only the ter­mi­nal alpha­bet of the gram­mar — 'bols' in the lan­guage of drum play­ers. But we could map oth­er keys to fre­quent­ly used vari­ables or expres­sions in this work environment.

When work­ing with the tabla, Jim Kippen man­aged to posi­tion the words at key­board loca­tions that facil­i­tat­ed typ­ing at the same speed at which he would play them on the tabla. For this rea­son, "dha" is locat­ed at the far left.

To acti­vate the map­ping, click on the desired posi­tion in the gram­mar and then press the 'Escape' key. Now, if you type "qcqqcrd" — or "QcQQCrd", etc. — you will get:

dhatit­ed­had­hatit­ed­heena

This works in MacOS, Windows and Linux environments.

Alphabetic keys that are not mapped, such as 'A' and 'N', will be inac­tive. Non-alphabetic keys, such as dig­its and typo­graph­ic sym­bols, will func­tion as normal.

If the "Add space after each word" option is checked, and the map­ping is saved, typ­ing "qcqqcrd" will produce:

dha tite dha dha tite dhee na

The Bol Processor can seg­ment strings with­out spaces if they are made of words from the ter­mi­nal alpha­bet, here "-al.dhadhatite". However, adding spaces makes it eas­i­er to read for untrained humans.

The same key­board map­ping fea­ture can be used on a Data page such as "-da.dhadhatite".