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
Pulses per quarter note Pulses per quarter note PPQN (Pulses Per Quarter Note, also known as PPQ, Pulses Per Quarter and TPQN, Ticks Per Quarter Note) is the smallest unit of time used for sequencing note and automation events, both by step sequencers and in the MIDI standard. Most MIDI sequencers allow the number of PPQ to be varied for more or less temporal resolution depending on the needs of the performer. If there are too few PPQ any performance recorded into the MIDI sequencer may sound artificial (being quantised by the Pulse rate) or lose subtle variations in timing that gives music a