As an art form, music is pretty unique. It’s unlike painting, sculpture, architecture, glasswork—and a bunch of other kinds of art—for one big reason. It takes time to unfold and make sense. Unlike other art forms, music must have time to work its way from beginning to end.
To put it another way, it’s easy to experience something like the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David in an instant. The moment we see this kind of art, our brains understand it.
But with music, a song needs time to expand and move forward. It’s kind of cool that way. Music is time … and time is music. So if time stood still, the world would be silent.
Because music is all about time, we obviously need a way to illustrate it in music notation. And just as you might expect, musicians have already come up with a clever way of doing just that. Using “duration” symbols, we can show—in detail—exactly how a song should sound.