Half note Half note In music, a half note (American) or minim (British) is a note played for half the duration of a whole note (or semibreve) and twice the duration of a quarter note (or crotchet). It was given its Latin name ("minima", meaning "least or smallest") because it was the shortest of the five note values used in early medieval music notation . In time signatures with 4 as the bottom number, such as or , the half note is two beats long. However, when 2 is the bottom number (including "alla breve", ), the half note is one beat
Augmentation (music) be called augmentation. A melody or series of notes is "augmented" if the lengths of the notes are prolonged; augmentation is thus the opposite of diminution, where note values are shortened. A melody originally consisting of four quavers (eighth notes) for example, is augmented if it later appears with four crotchets (quarter notes) instead. This technique is often used in contrapuntal music, as in the "canon by augmentation" (""per augmentationem""), in which the notes in the following voice or voices are longer than those in the leading voice, usually twice the original length. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach provides