Numbered musical notation and so on. Dashes after a note lengthen it, each dash by the length of a quarter note. A dot after the plain or underlined note works increases its length by half, and two dots by three quarters. The underline, along with its joining, are analogous to the number of flags and beaming in standard notation. So are dotted notes. But the analogue stops at notes worth three quarter notes and beyond, where dashes are used instead. The number "0" represents the musical rest. The rules for length is similar to that of the note, except that it is customary
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