Music Theory: Note Lengths, Time Signatures, and the Score

Hello everyone and welcome back to your favorite bloggy thing about Music Theory, or however you view it. I just got back from a surprise vacation my family kidnapped me to in Oregon, so sorry if this is a little late!

Note: Did not have access to my home computer when writing this so there are no sound clips.

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Last time, we talked about the notes and the major scales and some basic fundamental notey things. Using just those things, you can already understand and write music (more complex scales will be introduced later). This time, we will give you the rest of the knowledge you need to make your own music, or decipher others: note lengths, time signatures, and the score.

First up, types of notes and their lengths. "The...way universally adopted is within musical programs is called the American way. Within this system, each note is given a value that refers to its length as a proportion of a whole note.  This method uses the terminology of whole note, half note, quarter note, and so on," (Hewitt, 42). The most commonly known note in music is the quarter note. Generally, students learn this note first, and it looks like this:

The quarter note, as stated by its name, is a quarter of something, which we will get to in a second. The second note most students learn is the half note:

This note is a half of a larger whole, and equivalent to the length of 2 quarter notes. This leads us to the third note, which makes the earlier names make sense, the whole note:

The whole note, is obviously, a full length note, and is equivalent to 2 half notes, or 4 quarter notes. With these three notes, you could easily right whole songs, especially when combined with the notes of the last post, but, there is more. Things like eighth notes, sixteenth notes, or thirty-secondth notes. Every one of these notes is marked as a quarter note, with one or more flags coming off of it, depending on how small it is:

Eighth Notes

Sixteenth Notes

There are 2 eighth notes in a quarter note, 2 sixteenth notes in an eighth note, and so on. But that isn't all either. During some times, there will be notes you wish to be places in the spaces between notes. This is accomplished by adding a dot after the notes. This dot increases the length of the note by half of its original length (Hewitt, 45). For example: A normal half note is 2 quarter notes long, but a dotted half note is worth 3 quarter notes. You can add a dot to any note to extend it by half of its length:

Dotted Half Note Equivalent

Along with all of the markings that denote when to play or make a noise, there are also symbols that tell when not to play. These are called rests, and are categorized by the same system as the notes., quarters, halves, and wholes, along with all the rest:

The Full Scale of Notes and Rests (to sixteenths)

While you now have knowledge of notes and their lengths, you still cannot write music or properly read it without knowledge of time signatures and how they work. Time signatures are indicators of the metric cycle used in a composition (Hewitt, 72). They consist of 2 numbers, one above and below. The upper number (numerator) denotes how many beats are in a measure, and the lower number (denominator) indicates what the value of those beats are. Here are some common time signatures:

Using the previous information you can start putting together rhythms and melodies to make a song, but how do you write it down? That is where the score comes in. The score, or staff, is a "series of 5 lines upon which you can place musical notes," (Hewitt, 53). This is what a blank staff looks like.

On these lines, and between them, you can place notes which correlate to the notes we discussed in the last post. But this can be a little confusing. See, there are two different kinds of staff used in general music, found together most often in piano sheet music. These are the Treble Clef and Bass Clef:

Treble Clef (Top) and Bass Clef (Bottom)

These are designed to maximize the amount of notes you can right down, as five lines and the spaces between them cannot hold all of the notes. Another way that the staff maximizes note placement is with ledger lines. Ledger lines appear on notes above or below the staff that would have appeared on a line if they had continued. The image of the scale I used in the first post used ledger lines for the first note, C.

The ledger lines connect the two parts of the staff, the bass and treble clef, as one line above the bass clef or below the treble clef is middle C. Using this you can count up and down notes through each staff and fill in the notes, to crate your own songs.

With this information you now have all you need to read others' music and to create your own. Thanks for stopping by!

Question: How will you use this knowledge?

Hewitt, Michael. Music Theory for Computer Musicians. Boston: Course Technology, 
     CENGAGE Learning, 2008. Print.