Two hundred fifty-sixth note
In music, a two hundred fifty-sixth note (or occasionally demisemihemidemisemiquaver) is a note played for 1⁄256 of the duration of a whole note. It lasts half as long as a hundred twenty-eighth note and takes up one quarter of the length of a sixty-fourth note. In musical notation it has a total of six flags or beams.
Notes this short are very rare in printed music but not unknown. They are principally used for brief, rapid sections in slow movements. For example they occur in some editions of the second movement of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto (Op. 37), to notate rapid scales. Another example is in Mozart's Variations on "Je suis Lindor", where four of them are used in the slow twelfth variation. A further example occurs in Jan Ladislav Dussek's Fifth Piano Sonata, Op. 10 No. 2. They also occur in Vivaldi's Concerto, RV 444, and in bar 15 of François Couperin's Second Prelude from L'art de toucher le clavecin.
256th note
256th rest
The names of this note (and rest) vary greatly in many languages:
(romanization [Japanese pron.]: Ni hyaku go jū roku buonpu)
(romanization [Japanese]: Ni hyaku go jū roku-bu kyūshifu)
The next note value shorter than the 256th note is the 512th note with seven flags or beams; it is half as long as the 256th note. After this would come the 1024th note (eight flags or beams), the 2048th note (nine flags or beams), the 4096th note (ten flags or beams), and so on indefinitely, with each note half the length of its predecessor. The shortest note value to have ever been used in a published work is the 1024th note (notated incorrectly as a 2048th note) in Anthony Philip Heinrich's Toccata Grande Cromatica from The Sylviad, Set 2, written around 1825; 256th notes occur frequently in this piece, and some 512th notes also appear. For comparison, the shortest notated duration supported by Finale is a 4096th note, while LilyPond can write beamed notes as short as a 1073741824th (= 230th) note.
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