Rest

A rest in music is a duration of time when the music, or one part of the music, does not have any notes, and therefore there is a silence.
When one part is being played or sung by one or more people, the word rest is therefore very appropriate, because they can have a rest at that point.
The lengths of rests are notated by their shape and there is a rest length for every note length; unfortunately, there is very little commonality between the shapes used, except that the number of tails on a quaver rest has the same meaning as the number of tails or beams on a quaver note.
Quaver rests are not beamed together like quaver notes:
- No more than two quaver rests are ever written consecutively, higher value rests would be used instead.
- Two rests of the same value are only ever written consecutively for the same reason as two notes of the same note length are tied together, because of the rules of grouping.
- A silence of two seconds is indistinguishable from two consecutive silences of one second each.
For the same reason, rests are not tied together like notes.
Rests can be dotted just like notes, but this is not so common; multiple rests are more often used.