Music Symbols

Music notation that behaves as ordinary text: the quarter note ♩, eighth note ♪, beamed pairs ♫ ♬, the accidentals ♭ ♮ ♯ and the treble clef 𝄞. The first seven sit inside the basic character range, so they survive in a username or bio where the clef and the emoji often will not.

Copy and Paste Music Symbols

Almost everyone who wants a music symbol wants it for text — a username, a playlist name, a bio, a caption. That is worth knowing before you pick one, because the characters on this page do not all behave the same way once pasted. ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ are ordinary text characters and go anywhere. The clefs and the emoji are a different matter, explained below.

What Are Music Symbols?

Music symbols are Unicode characters taken from musical notation. The seven best known sit together at U+2669 to U+266F and were encoded early, which is why they are the ones that work everywhere: four note shapes and three accidentals. ♩ is a quarter note — a crotchet in British usage — and ♪ is an eighth note, or quaver. ♫ is two eighth notes joined by a beam and ♬ is two sixteenth notes.

Beyond those, Unicode holds a very large Musical Symbols block with rests, time signatures, dynamics and ornaments, plus a Byzantine notation block of nearly 250 characters. Almost none of it renders in an ordinary font or is any use in text, so this page carries the clefs and the double accidentals from it and leaves the rest to notation software.

How to Use Music Symbols

Music Symbols in Text and Usernames

♫ beside a name reads as music without the size jump an emoji brings, and it takes your text colour rather than arriving pre-drawn. That is the practical reason to prefer ♪ over 🎵 in a display name: the emoji is rendered by the platform at a fixed size and looks different on every device, while the note is just a character in your font.

Typing Music Symbols on a Keyboard

Two of these have genuinely short Windows shortcuts, and they are among the few symbols that do: hold Alt and press 13 on the numeric keypad for ♪, or 14 for ♫. Both come from the original PC character set, which put them in its first sixteen positions. Be aware that Alt+13 is a carriage return in some applications and will insert a line break instead — if that happens, copying the character is the way round it.

Nothing else here has a short code. ♩ needs Alt and 9833, ♭ 9837, ♯ 9839. In Word you can type 266A and press Alt+X. On a Mac the Character Viewer opens with Ctrl+Cmd+Space; on Linux, Ctrl+Shift+U then 266A.

Why Some Music Symbols Break in Text

The clefs 𝄞 𝄡 𝄢 and the double accidentals 𝄪 𝄫 live above U+FFFF, outside the range that older software assumes. Two things follow. Many fonts have no drawing for them, so they appear as an empty box. And some input fields count characters in a way that splits them in half, which either truncates your text or leaves a broken character behind.

If a music symbol has to work reliably in a username, a form field or a system that you do not control, use one of the seven from U+2669 to U+266F. If it is going somewhere modern and you have checked how it looks, 𝄞 is the most recognisable music symbol there is.

Types of Music Symbols

Note Shapes in Music Symbols

♩ quarter note, ♪ eighth note, ♫ beamed eighth notes, ♬ beamed sixteenth notes. These four are the whole set of note characters in the basic range — Unicode never added a half note or whole note there, which is why you will not find one. 🎵 and 🎶 are the emoji equivalents, drawn as an eighth note and a pair of beamed notes.

Accidental Music Symbols

♭ lowers a note by a semitone, ♯ raises it, and ♮ cancels either. ♯ is worth a closer look: it is not the hash sign. A sharp has two vertical strokes and two slanted horizontals; a hash has the opposite. Musicians type ♯ where a keyboard offers only the hash, and in a chord name or a key signature the difference is visible. 𝄪 𝄫 are the double sharp and double flat.

Clef Music Symbols

𝄞 is the G clef, better known as the treble clef. 𝄢 is the F clef, the bass clef. 𝄡 is the C clef, which moves on the stave and is called alto or tenor depending on where it sits. All three are astral characters with the rendering caveats above.

Instrument Music Symbols

🎸 🎻 🎺 🎷 🎹 🥁 🪕 🪗 🪈 📯 cover the instruments Unicode has encoded, and 🎼 is a musical score. These are emoji rather than notation, so they arrive in colour at a fixed size.

Sound and Studio Music Symbols

🔈 🔉 🔊 🔇 are the four speaker states, from silent to loud, which is what a volume control needs. 📢 📣 are the loudspeaker and megaphone. 🎙 🎚 🎛 are the studio microphone, level slider and control knobs, and 🎤 🎧 📻 the microphone, headphones and radio.

Best Uses for Music Symbols

Music Symbols in Bios and Playlist Names

A playlist name is the ideal case for these, because the field is plain text and usually has a character limit. ♫ costs one character where an emoji may cost two, and it will not be stripped by a service that filters emoji out of display names.

Music Symbols in Documents

Writing about music in plain prose is where ♯ and ♭ earn their place — "F♯ minor" is correct where "F# minor" is a workaround. 𝄞 works as a section marker in a document whose font you control.

Music Symbols Unicode Names and Codes

The formal names are plain: ♩ is U+2669 Quarter Note, ♪ U+266A Eighth Note, ♫ U+266B Beamed Eighth Notes, ♬ U+266C Beamed Sixteenth Notes, ♭ U+266D Music Flat Sign, ♮ U+266E Music Natural Sign, ♯ U+266F Music Sharp Sign. The clefs are much further up: 𝄞 is U+1D11E, 𝄡 U+1D121, 𝄢 U+1D122.

That gap between U+266F and U+1D11E is the whole story of which characters are safe. Everything in the first group predates widespread Unicode support and is in essentially every font; everything in the second was added later and is not.

Frequently Asked Questions About Music Symbols

What is the Alt code for a music note?

Alt+13 gives ♪ and Alt+14 gives ♫, both on the numeric keypad. They work because the original PC character set placed them in its first sixteen positions. In some applications Alt+13 inserts a carriage return instead, and the longer codes — Alt+9833 for ♩, Alt+9834 for ♪ — avoid that.

What is the difference between ♪ and ♫?

♪ is a single eighth note, a quaver. ♫ is two eighth notes joined by a beam, which is how they are written when they fall within one beat. ♬ is the same idea with sixteenth notes and a double beam.

Is ♯ the same as the hash sign?

No. ♯ is U+266F, drawn with two upright strokes and two slanted crossbars. The hash is U+0023 and is drawn the other way round, with upright crossbars and slanted verticals. They look similar at small sizes and mean nothing alike.

Why does the treble clef show as a box?

𝄞 sits above U+FFFF, and a font that predates that part of Unicode has no drawing for it. The same applies to the other clefs and the double accidentals. The seven characters from ♩ to ♯ do not have this problem.

Are there symbols for rests and time signatures?

Unicode encodes them, in the Musical Symbols block from U+1D100, but they are meant for notation software rather than text and almost no ordinary font draws them. This page carries the clefs and double accidentals from that block because those are recognisable on their own, and leaves the rest where it belongs.

What about Indian sargam notes?

Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni are written with ordinary letters, in Latin or in an Indic script, rather than with dedicated characters. There is no Unicode block for sargam the way there is for Western notation, so nothing here corresponds to them.

Related Collections for Music Symbols

The sharp and flat signs sit alongside the operators on the math symbols page, and 🔔 belongs with the objects listed at symbol collections. For a whole line of text restyled rather than a single character, the font generator does that instead. Star and heart marks that often sit beside a music note in a bio are on the star symbols and heart symbols pages.