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A regular grid (e.g. on a piece of graph paper) is made up of squares which (by definition) have no structure. When people stare at such a grid, however, they may nevertheless see a shifting array of structured patterns such as lines, crosses, or even block-letters — something that doesn’t occur when staring at a blank page. This is the phenomenon of scaffolded attention, and recent work has demonstrated that this involves the creation of bona fide object representations (e.g. that enjoy ‘same-object advantages’). Is this an intrinsically visuospatial phenomenon, or might it rather reflect a much more general effect of perceiving structure from regular scaffolds, which could also occur in other dimensions or modalities? Here we show for the first time that there is also robust scaffolded attention in time: a regular series of tones (as might come from a metronome) has no structure beyond the ‘beats’ themselves, but …