Sixteenth note Sixteenth note In music, a sixteenth note (American) or semiquaver (British) is a note played for half the duration of an eighth note (quaver), hence the names. It is the equivalent of the semifusa in mensural notation, first found in 15th-century notation . Sixteenth notes are notated with an oval, filled-in note head and a straight note stem with two flags (see Figure 1). A single sixteenth note is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups . A corresponding symbol is the sixteenth rest (or semiquaver rest), which denotes a silence for the same
Blue note Blue note In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch than standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone, but this varies among performers and genres. The existence of the blue note within music derives, in part, from the fact that equal temperament in western diatonic harmony is an artifice or compromise originally employed in the eighteenth century to address problems posed in the creation of keyboard instruments. Equal temperament was an artificial 'straightening out' of a tendency for the natural harmonic series (musical