Musical note

In music, notes are distinct and isolatable sounds that act as the most basic building blocks for nearly all of music. This discretization facilitates performance, comprehension, and analysis. Notes may be visually communicated by writing them in musical notation.

Notes can distinguish the general pitch class or the specific pitch played by a pitched instrument. Although this article focuses on pitch, notes for unpitched percussion instruments distinguish between different percussion instruments (and/or different manners to sound them) instead of pitch. Note value expresses the relative duration of the note in time. Dynamics for a note indicate how loud to play them. Articulations may further indicate how performers should shape the attack and decay of the note and express fluctuations in a note's timbre and pitch. Notes may even distinguish the use of different extended techniques by using special symbols.

The term note can refer to a specific musical event, for instance when saying the song "Happy Birthday to You", begins with two notes of identical pitch. Or more generally, the term can refer to a class of identically sounding events, for instance when saying "the song begins with the same note repeated twice".

A note can have a note value that indicates the note's duration relative to the musical meter. In order of halving duration, these values are:

Longer note values (e.g. the longa) and shorter note values (e.g. the two hundred fifty-sixth note) do exist, but are very rare in modern times. These durations can further be subdivided using tuplets.

A rhythm is formed from a sequence in time of consecutive notes (without particular focus on pitch) and rests (the time between notes) of various durations.

Music theory in most European countries and others use the solfège naming convention. Fixed do uses the syllables re–mi–fa–sol–la–ti specifically for the C major scale, while movable do labels notes of any major scale with that same order of syllables.

Alternatively, particularly in English- and some Dutch-speaking regions, pitch classes are typically represented by the first seven letters of the Latin alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G), corresponding to the A minor scale. Several European countries, including Germany and Czechia, use H instead of B (see § 12-tone chromatic scale for details). Byzantium used the names Pa–Vu–Ga–Di–Ke–Zo–Ni (Πα–Βου–Γα–Δι–Κε–Ζω–Νη).