Figure 1. A 16th note with stem facing up, a 16th note with stem facing down, and a 16th rest. Figure 2. Four 16th notes beamed together. In

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

, a 1/16, sixteenth note ( American) or semiquaver (

British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. * British national identity, the characteristics of British people and culture ...

) is a note played for half the duration of an

eighth note 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 pla ...

(quaver), hence the names. It is the equivalent of the semifusa 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 ...

, first found in 15th-century notation. Sixteenth notes are notated with an oval, filled-in note head and a straight

note stem In musical notation, stems are the "thin, vertical line (geometry), lines that are directly connected to the notehead, otehead." Stems may point up or down. Different-pointing stems indicate the voice (music), voice for polyphonic music writ ...

with two

flag A flag is a piece of textile, fabric (most often rectangular) with distinctive colours and design. It is used as a symbol, a signalling device, or for decoration. The term ''flag'' is also used to refer to the graphic design employed, and fla ...

s (see Figure 1). A single sixteenth note is always stemmed with flags, while two or more are usually beamed in groups. A corresponding symbol is the sixteenth rest (or semiquaver rest), which denotes a silence for the same duration. As with all notes with stems, sixteenth notes are drawn with stems to the right of the notehead, facing up, when they are below the middle line of the musical staff (or on the middle line, in vocal music). When they are on the middle line (in instrumental music) or above it, they are drawn with stems on the left of the note head, facing down. Flags are always on the right side of the stem, and curve to the right. On stems facing up, the flags start at the top and curve down; for downward facing stems, the flags start at the bottom of the stem and curve up. When multiple sixteenth notes or eighth notes (or thirty-second notes, etc.) are next to each other, the flags may be connected with a beam, like the notes in Figure 2. Note the similarities in notating sixteenth notes and

s. Similar rules apply to smaller divisions such as

thirty-second note In music, a thirty-second note (American) or demisemiquaver (British) is a note played for of the duration of a whole note (or ''semibreve''). It lasts half as long as a sixteenth note (or ''semiquaver'') and twice as long as a sixty- ...

s (demisemiquavers) and sixty-fourth notes (hemidemisemiquavers). 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 ...

, U+266C (♬) is a pair of beamed semiquavers. The note derives from the ''semifusa'' in

. However, ''semifusa'' also designates the modern sixty-fourth note in Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese.

References

Note values {{music-theory-stub

See also

References