What does Flag mean in music?

Answer 1

A flag on a note tells you what kind of note it is and how many beats it has.

A note with a flag is an eighth note, and usually gets half a beat. A note with two flags is a sixteenth note, and so on.

Answer 2

In 4/4 or common time (the basis for almost all popular Western music) a quarter note receives one beat. The familiar count-out 1-2-3-4 (think tapping your foot to music) is counting these quarter notes. Quarter notes have solid heads and straight up or down stems (depending on how high or low they are on the staff) with no flags. If you take a quarter note and divide its beat into two shorter beats (This is known as the "subdivision of the beat"), you end up with two 8th notes. These are counted 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and... 8 beats per measure in 4/4 time. These notes appear identical to quarter notes save one detail- a single flag appears at the end of its stem. This is how we identify it as an 8th note instead of a quarter note. Now take one of these single-stemmed 8th notes and divide it into two beats like before. You now have 2 16th notes, equal in duration to one 8th note. It takes 4 of them to make up one quarter note. They are counted like this: 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a-3-e-and-a-4-e-and-a... Like the cymbal strikes in the intro of the Shaft theme song by Isaac Hayes. To tell them apart from 8th notes, they have two flags on their stems, one above the other in the same direction. We can continue this convention to 32nd notes (3 stems) 64th notes (4 stems) 128th notes (5 stems) etc. When 2 or more flagged notes appear in music sequentially in the same measure with no rests or "flagless" notes between them, the flags are turned into bars connecting the notes. This makes them easier to read and write when working on complicated subdivisions.

Answer 3

this means that the music is stopped or being stopped by a note

Answer 4

Simply - music is made up of sound and silence. Notes represent sound while rests represent silence.