Following Des Murs’s new systematisation of musical duration, it now appeared possible (in theory at least) to notate a manifold variety of durations along the line of time. This is the intention of Des Murs’s revolutionary claim that ‘whatever can be sung can now be written down’. In chapter 6, I analyse a series of fourteenth-century motets with respect to this new articulation of musical time as a cumulative and/or divisible linear entity. This conceptualisation of musical time is fundamentally different from the cyclical organisation of musical time in the ars antiqua. I focus on one particular element of music notation—the dot (punctus)—and on how ars nova composers used this element in ways central to the compositional design of their motets. For Vitry and his contemporaries, through the discrete deployment of the dot, and techniques enabled by it, such as syncopation and rhythmic displacement, duration could be separated from (and even work against) the underlying metre. This resulted in a musical sound very different from that heard in the ars antiqua.