Recent scholarship has departed from a view of meter as a static structure inherent in scores to a view of meter as something people do, in time, while listening to music (Hasty 1997, Dodson 2002, Mirka 2009, Rothstein 2012). While this scholarship has offered a more psychologically rich model of the outside listener’s experience, insufficient attention has been devoted to the performers’ role creating metrical interplay within an ensemble, in time, as they play (cf. Lewin’s [1987] ‘transformational attitude’). This paper presents a new model for the in-time analysis of metrical manipulations as the actions of individual players. By ‘players’, I refer partly to actual instrumentalists - who, quite literally, create or enact all metrical events in performance - but also to their fictional counterparts - characters within the piece whose ‘conversation’ is encoded in the music (Cone 1975; Maus 1988; Klorman 2013).