Reading music is a skill that is more difficult than reading a book; reading music requires math. To the untrained eye, written music may look like a foreign language created by madmen, but every blotch and line signifies a different note, style, or subdivision of that song. Musicians are the best at multitasking. In one measure, a musician may be dividing a single beat into two, three, four, six…all the way up to 64 even lengths as well as playing that many separate pitches and keeping it all in time. There is a reason why there are so little successful musicians.
Dividing a beat starts with knowing how many beats are in a measure; this is known by the time signature. The most common time signature is four-four. 
The two numbers are written on top of each other and put on the right hand side of the key signature and clef. The number on top represents how many beats are in each measure and the number on bottom shows the note value of each beat. In four-four, there are four beats in a measure and the quarter note is one beat. Another common time signature is three-four; this means there are three beats in a measure and the quarter note is one beat. There are all different kinds of time signatures that communicate what the length of each note is.
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