Amanous: Distribution-Switching for Superhuman Piano Density on Disklavier

Joonhyung Bae

The automated piano enables note densities, polyphony, and register changes far beyond human physical limits, yet the three dominant traditions for composing such textures--Nancarrow's tempo canons, Xenakis's stochastic distributions, and L-system grammars--have developed in isolation. This paper presents Amanous, a hardware-aware composition system for Yamaha Disklavier that unifies these methodologies through distribution-switching: L-system symbols select distinct distributional regimes rather than merely modulating parameters within a fixed family. Four contributions are reported. (1) A four-layer architecture (symbolic, parametric, numeric, physical) produces statistically distinct sections with large effect sizes (d = 3.70-5.34), validated by per-layer degradation and ablation experiments. (2) A hardware abstraction layer formalizes velocity-dependent latency and key reset constraints, keeping superhuman textures within the Disklavier's actuable envelope. (3) A density sweep reveals a computational saturation transition at 24-30 notes/s (bootstrap 95% CI: 23.3-50.0), beyond which single-domain melodic metrics lose discriminative power and cross-domain coupling becomes necessary. (4) A convergence point calculus operationalizes tempo-canon geometry as a control interface, enabling convergence events to trigger distribution switches linking macro-temporal structure to micro-level texture. All results are computational; a psychoacoustic validation protocol is proposed for future work. The pipeline has been deployed on a physical Disklavier, demonstrating algorithmic self-consistency and sub-millisecond software precision. Supplementary materials (Excerpts 1-4): https://www.amanous.xyz. Source code: https://github.com/joonhyungbae/Amanous.

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