Note value French for a 'little hook', and it is possible to argue that the same is true of the "minim", since the word is also used in palaeography to mean a vertical stroke in mediaeval handwriting. Note value In music notation, a note value indicates the relative duration of a note, using the texture or shape of the "note head", the presence or absence of a "stem", and the presence or absence of "flags/beams/hooks/tails". Unmodified note values are fractional powers of two, for example one, one-half, one fourth, etc. A rest indicates a silence of an equivalent duration. The breve appears
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