Appendix:Modern musical symbols

Modern musical symbols are the marks and symbols that are widely used in musical scores of all styles and instruments today. This is intended to be a comprehensive English guide to the various symbols encountered in modern musical notation.

Clefs
Clefs define the pitch range, or tessitura, of the staff on which it is placed. A clef is usually the leftmost symbol on a staff. Additional clefs may appear in the middle of a staff to indicate a change in register for instruments with a wide range. In early music, clefs could be placed on any of several lines on a staff. Tablature For guitars and other plucked instruments it is possible to notate tablature in place of ordinary notes. In this case, a TAB-sign is often written instead of a clef. The number of lines of the staff is not necessarily five: one line is used for each string of the instrument (so, for standard 6-stringed guitars, six lines would be used). Numbers on the lines show on which fret the string should be played. This Tab-sign, like the Percussion clef, is not a clef in the true sense, but rather a symbol employed instead of a clef. The interstitial spaces on a tablature are never used.

Notes and rests
Note and rest values are not absolutely defined, but are proportional in duration to all other note and rest values. The whole note is the reference value, and the other notes are named (in American) in comparison; i.e. a quarter note is a quarter the length of a whole note.

Durations shorter than the 64th are rare but not unknown. 128th notes are used by Mozart and Beethoven; 256th notes occur in works of Vivaldi and even Beethoven. An extreme case is the Toccata Grande Cromatica by early-19th-century American composer Anthony Phillip Heinrich, which uses note values as short as 2,048ths; however, the context shows clearly that these notes have one beam more than intended, so they should really be 1,024th notes.

The name of very short notes can be found with this formula: $$Name = 2^{(\text{number of flags on note} + 2)}$$th note.

Common accidentals
Accidentals modify the pitch of the notes that follow them on the same staff position within a measure, unless cancelled by an additional accidental.

Key signatures
Key signatures define the prevailing key of the music that follows, thus avoiding the use of accidentals for many notes. If no key signature appears, the key is assumed to be C major/A minor, but can also signify a neutral key, employing individual accidentals as required for each note. The key signature examples shown here are described as they would appear on a treble staff.

Quarter-tone accidentals
These are examples of the most common notation for music involving quarter tones. (Microtonal notation in Western music is not widely standardized and other symbols may be used instead of the ones below.)

Time signatures
Time signatures define the meter of the music. Music is "marked off" in uniform sections called bars or measures, and time signatures establish the number of beats in each. This is not necessarily intended to indicate which beats are emphasized, however. A time signature that conveys information about the way the piece actually sounds is thus chosen. Time signatures tend to suggest, but only suggest, prevailing groupings of beats or pulses.

Dynamics
Dynamics are indicators of the relative intensity or volume of a musical line. Other commonly used dynamics build upon these values. For example "piano-pianissimo" (represented as 'ppp' meaning so softly as to be almost inaudible, and forte-fortissimo, ('fff') meaning extremely loud. In some European countries, use of this dynamic has been virtually outlawed as endangering the hearing of the performers. A small "s" in front of the dynamic notations means "subito", and means that the dynamic is to be changed to the new notation rapidly. Subito is commonly used with sforzandos, but all other notations, most commonly as "sff" (subitofortissimo) or "spp" (subitopianissimo).

Another value that rarely appears is niente, which means 'nothing'. This may be used at the end of a diminuendo to indicate 'fade out to nothing'.

Articulation marks
Articulations (or accents) specify how individual notes are to be performed within a phrase or passage. They can be fine-tuned by combining more than one such symbol over or under a note. They may also appear in conjunction with phrasing marks listed above.

Ornaments
Ornaments modify the pitch pattern of individual notes.

Guitar
The guitar has a right-hand fingering notation system derived from the names of the fingers in Spanish. They are written above, below, or beside the note to which they are attached. They read as follows:

Pedal marks
These pedal marks appear in music for instruments with sustain pedals, such as the piano and vibraphone.