What Sheet Music Tells You
Core ideas about how notation encodes pitch and duration.
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Questions Covered in This Set
10 cards to master
What two questions does almost every mark on a page of sheet music answer?
Which note (pitch) and for how long (rhythm).
What does the vertical axis of the page represent?
Pitch — higher on the page means a higher-sounding note.
What does the horizontal axis represent?
Time — you read left to right, further right happens later.
What do notes stacked vertically at the same spot mean?
They sound simultaneously — that's a chord.
What is the staff?
Five horizontal lines with four spaces between them, where noteheads sit on lines or in spaces.
What does a clef do?
It's the key to the map: it tells you which specific pitch one line represents, so all other positions follow.
What are the letter names used in music?
A B C D E F G, recycled endlessly up and down — only seven names.
What three ingredients encode a note's duration?
Hollow or filled notehead, presence of a stem, and flags/beams on the stem.
State the shortcut rule for rhythm notation.
Hollow = long, filled = short, and every flag added cuts the value in half.
What is a rest?
A symbol for measured silence, with its own durations matching the note values.
