Music symbols
Notes, rests, clefs, accidentals, dynamics and the other marks of standard music notation, and what each one means.
Music symbols are the signs of staff notation: notes and rests for how long a sound or silence lasts, the staff and clefs for how high a note is, and marks for how loud, how smoothly or how detached to play, and where to go next. Each symbol below has its own page.
Notes 6 symbols
Rests 4 symbols
Clefs and staff 4 symbols
Dynamics and expression 6 symbols
Repeats and navigation 3 symbols
How the staff shows pitch
The staff has five lines and the spaces between them. The higher a note sits, the higher its pitch, and short ledger lines extend the staff above or below. A clef at the start of the staff names one line and so fixes all the others: the treble clef makes the second line from the bottom G, the bass clef makes the fourth line F, and the C clef makes the line through its centre middle C. A Sharp or Flat moves a note up or down a half step, and a Natural cancels either. Sharps or flats grouped at the start of each staff are the key signature; one beside a single note is an accidental, and lasts to the end of the measure.
How notes and rests show length
A note tells two things at once: its position on the staff gives the pitch, and its shape gives the length. A whole note is an open oval; a half note adds a stem; a quarter note has a filled head; an eighth note adds a flag, and a sixteenth note two. Each lasts half as long as the one before. Every note value has a matching rest for silence. A dot after a note makes it half as long again, and a tie joins two notes into one. Bar lines divide the staff into measures, and the time signature says how many beats each measure holds.
British and American names
American books such as Gehrkens’s Music Notation and Terminology (1914) name notes by fractions of a whole note. British usage keeps older names: the whole note is a semibreve, the half note a minim, the quarter note a crotchet, the eighth note a quaver and the sixteenth note a semiquaver. The fraction names match the German ones. The music-font standard SMuFL gives both, as in “Whole note (semibreve)”.
Where the signs came from
Staff notation grew slowly out of the neumes, marks written over the words of medieval chant to show the rise and fall of a melody. Its invention is commonly credited to the Italian monk Guido d’Arezzo (about 995–1050), though Gehrkens (1914) doubted any one person deserves all the credit. The clefs began as the letters F, C and G written at the start of a line. Round and oval notes replaced square and diamond ones because they were easier to write. Bar lines appear as early as 1500 but were not used everywhere until about 1650.
Sources
- Music Notation and Terminology, Karl W. Gehrkens, 1914, A. S. Barnes Company (Project Gutenberg), Chapter II, §12–13, §15, §18–19, §24; Chapter III, §28, §31, §34; Appendix A
- Primer of Facts about Music, M. G. Evans, 1909, Theodore Presser Co. (Internet Archive, University of Toronto), Q. 12–26
- Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom: Notation, Robert Hutchinson, section 1.2, University of Puget Sound, Section 1.2
- Stainer and Barrett's Dictionary of Musical Terms, John Stainer and W. A. Barrett, new and revised edition, 1898, Novello (Internet Archive, Cornell University Library), Nomenclature
- SMuFL: Individual notes, Standard Music Font Layout, glyph table U+E1D0–U+E1EF, W3C Music Notation Community Group, U+E1D2
Last reviewed September 26, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research