**Music notation** is the practice of representing musical sounds in a visual format. Although many notation systems have emerged throughout history and across cultures, modern Western music notation is perhaps the most widely used system in academic and commercial settings today. The two most fundamental aspects of Western music notation are pitch and rhythm. **Pitch** refers to the highness or lowness of sounds whereas **rhythm** refers to the organization of sounds over time. Sounds that we perceive as having a definitive pitch and rhythmic duration are called **notes**. Pitch and rhythm are often likened to the axes of a graph, with the x-axis indicating rhythm and the y-axis indicating pitch. As shown in **Example 1**, note A occurs earlier in time than note B and is lower in pitch. **Example 1.** Graph showing the relationship between pitch and rhythm. ![[music notation example 1.png]] Many undergraduate music theory textbooks seem to prioritize pitch over rhythm, introducing pitch-related concepts such as the [[Staff]] before addressing rhythm-related concepts like [[Note Values]]. However, there is no reason to suggest that this order is necessary. One can just as easily start with the fundamentals of [[Rhythm]] and then proceed with the fundamentals of [[Pitch]].