Eighth note flag note flag (see Figure 1). The stem is placed to the right of the notehead and extends upwards if the notehead lies below the middle line of the staff, and to the left of the notehead extending downwards if the notehead lies on or above the middle line of the staff, in instrumental notation. In vocal music, a middle-line notehead extends upward instead of downward. A related symbol is the eighth rest (or quaver rest), which denotes a silence for the same duration . In Unicode, the symbols U+266A (♪) and U+266B (♫) are an eighth note and beamed
How Sacred Harp music is sung is a note whose duration is increased by half the duration of the base note. It is so called because musical notation uses a dot to express this durational ratio. Traditional Sacred Harp singers often "add dots" to their music, in the sense that they will make the notes falling on the strong musical beat about one and a half times as long as written, with the following note shortened to half of its written duration in compensation. The great majority of the cases seem to involve substitution of the sequence "dotted eighth + sixteenth" for what is written as