{animation of notes on a staff, narrator speaking:] Simply put, notes tell you the length of time or duration of the musical sound. Remember that time in music is expressed in beats per measure, and since notes tell us how to play a certain sound within a measure. Notes are often expressed as parts of a measure. In the previous lesson we learned that the staff tells us the pitch of a musical sound. We use notes to tell us when to play that sound, and how many beats of the measure to make it last. There are a number of different notes you need to know about. [examples of notes] This is a whole note. A whole note lasts for the whole measure. This is a half note. A half note lasts for half of the measure. This is a quarter note. A quarter note lasts for one quarter of the measure. This is an eighth note. It lasts for one eighth of a measure. Eighth notes are shown like this when they come one after the other. We could go on there are more types of notes. There are sixteenth notes, and thirty-second notes, even sixty-fourth, and one hundred twenty eighth notes, but for now we will stick with the basic types of notes we just learned.

This staph with a treble clef will help us learn more about notes. Remember the "c" means to use 4/4 time, so we know there are four beats per measure. As we mentioned at the first of the lesson a note tells us how long a musical sound lasts. Lets start by putting a whole note on the part of the staph that is reserved for the musical pitch "A". We have just written one measure of music. With a whole note on "A" we know to play the sound with the musical pitch "A" for the entire measure, because a whole note lasts for the whole measure. Here is how this measure is played. Here is a measure with two half notes. The first note is on the space representing "A", and the second one is on "C". Half notes tell us to play the pitches for one half of the measure. Since we are using 4/4 time, half of the measure is two beats. Here is how this measure sounds. Here is an example of quarter notes. The first is on "A", the second on "C", the third on "F", and the fourth again on "C". Each quarter note in 4/4 time lasts for one beat, or one fourth of the measure. The measure is played like this.