Hundred twenty-eighth note Hundred twenty-eighth note In music, a hundred twenty-eighth note or semihemidemisemiquaver or quasihemidemisemiquaver is a note played for of the duration of a whole note. It lasts half as long as a sixty-fourth note. It has a total of five flags or beams. Since human pitch perception begins at 20 Hz (1200/minute), then a 128th-note tremolo becomes a single pitch in perception at quarter note ≈ 160 bpm. A single 128th note is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups. Notes this short are very rare in printed music, but not unknown. One reason
Mensural notation and short notes (minims and crotchets), or groups of three short notes. In the 13th century, all of these were notated using only the longa and breve notes. A longa was automatically understood to fill a whole ternary metric group whenever it was in the neighborhood of other notes that did the same, i.e., whenever it was followed either by another longa or by a full group of three breves. When, however, the longa was preceded or followed by a single breve, then both filled a ternary group together. Thus, the longa had to be reduced to a value of