About This Guide

What this guide is

The statement below is the guide’s own position. It was written by the August 2026 external music-theory audit, which judged it a defensible and honest account of what this material is, and the guide adopts it unchanged.

This guide is not a comprehensive review of ethnomusicological literature. It is a practical companion to Poly’s preset library and engine parameters, grounded in a curated reading of published scholarship. Two things follow from this.

First, every numbered rule in the Theory Deep Dive pages summarises one or more specific published sources; those sources are listed on each page, and the Attribution notes say explicitly where a rule is the guide’s own compression rather than a direct citation. The mathematics of Euclidean distribution and the named theoretical frameworks (clave matrix, tala, colotomic structure, kotekan, aksak) are drawn from that scholarship. Where we simplify — and we do simplify — the theory pages say so.

Second, the patch recipes throughout this guide are designed to be idiomatic within the traditions they reference, not historically definitive. A Poly preset cannot replicate the microtiming profiles of a live jembe player, the exact bow pressure of a Balkan gadulka, or the precise clave orientation felt by a Cuban ensemble. What it can do is make those structural relationships — the timeline’s inviolability, the clave’s alignment rules, the interlocking complement — audible through an algorithmic system. The presets encode those structural relationships as starting points, not endpoints.

For readers who want to go deeper into any tradition, the Further Reading section of each theory page lists the primary scholarship. For readers who want to build idiomatic grooves, the patch recipes and construction procedures on each page are designed to give you working results quickly.

What this guide does not cover

Some questions are live in the literature and this guide does not settle them. Where that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight, it is named here.

Whether rumba clave predates or postdates son clave. The literature is divided — Acosta (2004) and Moore (2006) reach different conclusions — and this guide takes no position. Nothing in the patterns or the alignment rules depends on the answer: both claves are given as they are played, and the rules for aligning parts to either are the same whichever came first. A reader who wants that argument should go to those sources rather than to this guide.

The Carnatic tala system. The Indian classical material covers Hindustani practice. Carnatic music uses a different tala framework, and its absence is stated in Chapter 6 rather than left to be inferred from what is missing.

The simplifications the theory pages make. Several deep-dive rules compress or flatten something the scholarship treats with more nuance. Each is marked where it occurs rather than collected here, so the caveat sits with the claim it qualifies; the counterpoint overview explains the convention.