Articulation
Seven signs on the same four notes, each of them playable: the same note four times, and only the length and the attack change — the beat stays where it is.
Articulation says how a note is started and how long it is held. It does not change when it comes or which note it is: the four quarter notes sit in the same place in every picture on this page, and four times it is the same note. What changes is the sounding length inside the written value, and the force of the attack. The plain version comes first — it is the yardstick everything else is heard against.
No sign
The same note four times, with nothing written above it. Each note stops just short of the next — that tiny gap belongs to ordinary playing and is not yet a staccato. This is the version everything else is measured against.
Staccato
The dot above or below the notehead: the note sounds for about half of its written length, and the rest of the value is silence. It is the most common articulation mark there is, and it never means a different tempo — only a shorter note.
Staccatissimo
The small wedge, a filled spike instead of a dot: as short as the instrument allows, roughly a quarter of the written value. In older editions the wedge often stands where a plain staccato is meant — before 1800 the two signs are not cleanly separated.
Portato
A line and a dot together over one note: carried, yet detached. The note is held almost to the full and then clearly stopped — a middle thing the French call louré. On a string instrument the bow stays on the string throughout.
Tenuto
The horizontal line: the note is held for its full value, to the last moment of it, and is often given a little weight. The opposite of the dot — and the only case on this page where nothing is taken away.
Accent
The horizontal wedge: the note is attacked harder than its neighbours but keeps exactly the length it is written with. The emphasis lives in the attack, not in the duration; after the push the note falls back to its usual level.
Marcato
The upright spike: stronger than an accent and shorter with it — marked, sharp, set off with force. Both together make the difference: a marcato without the shortness is merely loud, and without the edge merely stressed.
Legato and slur
The curve over several notes: they run into each other without a break, each note sounding until the next one starts. Only the first note under the curve is attacked; on strings that means one bow stroke for all of them, on wind instruments a single tongue at the start.
What the sign actually changes
A dot above a note makes it shorter, not faster. The next note still arrives on its own beat — what sits in between is silence. Playing on earlier instead is not staccato, it is a change of tempo. That is what the play button makes audible here: the attacks line up across all eight pictures.
How short a staccato is depends on the tempo and on the instrument. On the violin it comes from lifting the bow, on the piano from releasing the key, on wind instruments from the tongue — one sign, three different movements. No edition states a number of hundredths, because there is none: the sign says shorter than written, and the rest is taste and practice.
Two slurs that are not articulation
The legato slur looks exactly like Tie, and the two get mixed up constantly: a tie joins two notes of the same pitch into one longer note, while a slur spans different notes and only says they flow into each other without a break. Two identical notes under a curve are therefore always a tie. And Fermata is not a matter of articulation at all but of time: it suspends the written value for as long as the performer holds it.
Music symbols · Dynamics · Ornaments · Music notation glossary
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