The note value allows us to specify the duration of a sound. In the example below you can see the note values and their duration:

Note Name (USA) Name (England) Value
Double Whole Note Breve or brevis Two whole notes
Whole Note Semibreve Two Half Notes
or a half of a
Double Whole Note
Half Note Minim Two Quarter Notes
or a half of a
Whole Note
Quarter Note Crotchet Two Eighth Notes
or a half of a
Half Note
Eighth Note Quaver Two Sixteenth Notes
or a half of a
Quarter Note
Sixteenth Note Semiquaver Two 32nd Notes
or a half of an
Eighth Note
32nd Note Demisemiquaver Two 64th Notes
or a half of a
Sixteenth Note
64th Note Hemidemisemiquaver Half of a
32nd Note
Names in other languages

As you may notice, each note duration is the double of the following note and half of the time than the previous one.

NOTE: When we write Eighth notes, Sixteenth notes, 32nd notes and 64th notes we customarily group with a beam all of those that are within a “family” (type of note), in order to facilitate the reading. Here are some examples:

See Reading Music in the Tutorials section.




  

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
José Rodríguez Alvira.