"A Chapman & Hall book."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-336) and index.

Prolegomenon -- Author -- What is rhythm? -- A steady beat -- Timelines, ostinatos, and meter -- The wooden claves -- The iron bells -- The clave son -- Six distinguished rhythm timelines -- The distance geometry of rhythm -- Classification of rhythms -- Binary and ternary rhythms -- The isomorphism of rhythm and scale -- Binarization, ternarization, and quantization of rhythms -- Syncopated rhythms : Keith's measure of syncopation -- Necklaces and bracelets -- Rhythmic oddity -- Off-beat rhythms -- Rhythm complexity : Objective, cognitive, and performance complexities ; Lempel-ziv complexity ; Cognitive complexity of rhythms ; Irregularity and the normalized pairwise variability index -- Dispersion problems and maximally even rhythms -- Euclidean rhythms -- Leap years: the rhythm of the stars -- Approximately even rhythms -- Rhythms and crystallography -- Complementary rhythms -- Radio astronomy and flat rhythms -- Deep rhythms -- Shelling rhythms -- Phantom rhythms -- Reflection rhythms and rhythmic canons -- Toggle rhythms -- Symmetric rhythms : Hourglass drums and hourglass rhythms -- Odd rhythms -- Other representations of rhythm : Alternating-hands box notation ; Spectral notation ; Tedas and chronotonic notation -- Rhythmic similarity and dissimilarity -- Regular and irregular rhythms -- Evolution and phylogenesis of musical rhythm : Guajira -- Rhythmic combinatorics -- What makes the clave son such a good rhythm? : Maximal evenness ; Rhythmic oddity ; Off-beatness ; Weighted off-beatness -- Metrical complexity -- Main-beat onsets and closure ; Distinct durations ; Distinct adjacent durations ; Onset-complexity and distinct distances ; Deep rhythms, deepness, and shallowness ; Tallness ; Phylogenetic tree centrality ; Mirror symmetry ; Shadow contour isomorphism -- The origin, evolution, and migration of the clave son -- Epilogue.