Mensural notation recoverable from the modern text. While 19th and early 20th century editions of Renaissance music often preserved the large note values of the originals, including breves and longs, most modern editions will use scaled-down note values in order to match modern reading habits regarding tempo and beat structure. For 16th century music, a frequent scheme is diminution by a factor of 2 (i.e., rendering semibreves as modern minims), in a modern "alla breve" bar. Older music might be diminished by a factor of 4 (rendering semibreves as crotchets) or sometimes 8 (rendering breves as crotchets). For 13th-century pieces, diminution by
Time signature note), in contradiction to the literal meaning of the phrase, it still indicates that the beat has changed to a longer note value. Time signature The time signature (also known as meter signature, metre signature, or measure signature) is a notational convention used in Western musical notation to specify how many beats (pulses) are contained in each measure (bar), and which note value is equivalent to a beat. In a music score, the time signature appears at the beginning as a time symbol or stacked numerals, such as or (read "common time" and "three-four time", respectively), immediately following the key