No, they're eighth notes because there are eight of them in a whole note. In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatu

No, they're eighth notes because there are eight of them in a whole note. In the UK we call them quavers, so we don't have this misconception. The time signatures are the same though - fortunately. They have to be represented somehow, although I'm sure we could do it better than we are it does the job. 3/4 is definitely meant to be 3/4, as it tells you are three beats in the bar, and those beats are represented by crotchets/quarter notes. They're not quarter notes because they're a quarter of the bar, but because you need four of them to make up the duration of a whole note. You can just as happily have a piece in 3/2, or 3/1, or 3/8, although in most genres all of those would imply different things about exactly how the rhythmic emphasis works. I do think we could do better around compound times like 6/8 and 9/8 vs simple times like 3/4 and 4/2, but we seem to manage okay. You do need genre knowledge to read music correctly, there's just no getting away from that. Any system which is capable of recording every nuance required would be unreadably dense. Although we have sound recording now, lucky us, so we can just use that...