Amanous: Distribution-Switching for Superhuman Piano Density on Disklavier

Joonhyung Bae

cs.MMFeb 28, 2026

Amanous: Distribution-Switching for Superhuman Piano Density on Disklavier

Authors: Joonhyung Bae

Abstract

A player piano can strike more keys, across more of the register, and faster than any pianist can reach. Three traditions dominate composition in that region, namely Nancarrow's tempo canons, Xenakis' stochastic distributions, and L-system grammars. They have developed in isolation, and none of them accounts for the instrument itself. A Disklavier does not answer instantly, because a loud note reaches the string sooner than a soft one, so music written as if the mechanism were transparent arrives distorted. We present Amanous, a hardware-aware composition system for the Yamaha Disklavier that unifies the three traditions through distribution-switching, in which each grammar symbol selects an entire distributional regime rather than adjusting parameters within a fixed one. A four-layer pipeline carries a symbol from grammar to actuation-ready MIDI. An L-system fixes the macro-form, each symbol is mapped to distributions and a tempo-canon ratio, events are sampled and time-scaled, and a hardware layer pre-compensates velocity-dependent latency and enforces the key-reset time. Convergence points close a feedback loop, letting the music's own temporal structure trigger the next switch. Sections from different symbols remain statistically separable at the output, and ablating the L-system, the tempo canon, or the hardware compensation each degrades a distinct property. Under the modelled latency curve, pre-compensation takes the mean onset error from roughly 18 ms to below the instrument's 1 ms scanning resolution. Structured and random textures are most separable near 25 notes/s, and melodic metrics lose their discriminative power over the 40-100 notes/s band, above which the difference is consistent with distributional content rather than melodic order. All results are computational, nothing was played or measured on an instrument, and a psychoacoustic protocol is proposed for future work.

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