"Rhythms traditionally framed as "deviations" have their own identities. They are coherent products of precise musical thought and action. Rather than situating them in the neither-here-nor-there, Swinglines takes an inclusive view where meter and isochrony are particular cases within the broader universe of musical time. This book flips the frame from what rhythm is not to what rhythm is. As conceptualized here, swing flattens the temporal field to consider how note values relate to one another by any magnitude, not just the simple ratios of traditional theory. At its core, Swinglines is a nuts-and-bolts study of durational comparisons in the context of creative expression. It encourages readers to experience what it is like to forget the metric hierarchy and instead approach rhythms as freewheeling affairs rather than by pointing to where they sit on the isochrony scale. Transcriptions and timing-data visualizations illustrate how variation, tuplets, polymeter, displacement, phrase structure, rhythmic counterpoint, parallel tempos, cyclical patterns, and time signatures draw their contours from the swing continuum"--