180px, Figure 1. An eighth note with stem extending up, an eighth note with stem extending down, and an eighth rest.
180px, Figure 2. Four eighth notes beamed together.
An eighth note (
American) or a quaver (
British) is a musical note played for one eighth the duration of a
whole note (semibreve). Its length relative to other rhythmic values is as expected—e.g., half the duration of a
quarter note (crotchet), one quarter the duration of a
half note (minim), and twice the value of a
sixteenth note. It is the equivalent of the ''fusa'' in
mensural notation
Mensural notation is the musical notation system used for polyphony, polyphonic European vocal music from the late 13th century until the early 17th century. The term "mensural" refers to the ability of this system to describe precisely measur ...
.
Notation
Eighth notes are notated with an oval, filled-in note head and a straight
note stem with one
note flag (see Figure 1). The stem is on the right of the notehead extending upwards or on the left extending downwards, depending primarily on where the notehead lies relative to the middle line of the staff. A related symbol is the eighth rest (or quaver rest), which denotes a silence for the same duration.
Eighth notes may be beamed together in groups (Figure 2). In , , , and they are typically beamed in groups of three. A single eighth note is always stemmed with a flag, while two or more are usually beamed in groups in instrumental music.
In
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, the symbol U+266A (♪) is a single eighth note and U+266B (♫) is a beamed pair of eighth notes. These symbols are inherited from the early 1980s
code page 437, where they occupied codes 13 and 14 respectively. Additions to the Unicode standard incorporated eighth note depictions from Japanese
emoji
An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...
sets: ascending eighth notes (U+1F39C, 🎜), descending eighth notes (U+1F39D, 🎝), a graphical generic musical note generally depicted as an eighth note (U+1F3B5, 🎵), and three unconnected eighth notes in sequence (U+1F3B6, 🎶). All of these are graphical
dingbats. In contrast, Unicode's
Musical Symbols block includes eighth note symbols designed to be used in computerized musical notation.
See also
*
List of musical symbols
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eighth Note
Note values