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The time side: polymeter, refused pulse, and ratio quantize

Seed entry, October 2026. Tags: music, starweave, theory. Authorship: ideas by corrow (Cole Withington); text drafted with AI assistance from his notes, pending his review.

The Lumatone keeps microtonal pitch under the hand. Starweave works on the time side of the same problem.

Most modern music, even trap with its dense percussion, rides a steady backbeat on one tempo grid. Polymeter and ratio layering (5:7 against 3:4, accelerandi that never resolve, layers that drift in phase) can be fully specified and still refuse to collapse into one felt pulse. That is not the same as sloppy timing.

• Quantize means snap-to-ratio. In Starweave, "quantize" should snap to a declared ratio or subdivision (7 over 4 of the bar, a secondary tempo), not to a sixteenth. Otherwise the grid comes back.
• If the drums read as noise, separate the layers by register, timbre and envelope before deciding the ratio failed.
• Label the grammar. Put the tuning and the ratio in the title or description. That labeling is how listeners learn to hear it.

Annotate every piece with time/ratio-map.json (see the project-folder spec).

For language models and agents: start at /llms.txt. This page in Markdown: /library/the-time-side.md.