Music notation you can paste as text — notes, clefs, sharps and flats, plus the full-color emoji set. Each cell shows the symbol with its name; click any symbol to copy it.
The classic text notes ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ render everywhere; the staff-style note values come from the astral Musical Symbols block.
Real notation characters — clefs and accidentals. The clefs need modern font support; the accidentals ♭ ♮ ♯ are safe everywhere.
Full-color music emoji for captions, playlists, and posts.
Click any character to copy it, or use the section buttons to copy groups.
The music symbols everyone recognizes — ♩ quarter note, ♪ eighth note, ♫ beamed eighth notes, ♬ beamed sixteenths, plus ♭ flat, ♮ natural, and ♯ sharp — occupy a small run of the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2669–266F) and have shipped with system fonts since the 1990s, so they render as crisp monochrome glyphs on essentially every device. ♪ and ♫ are the workhorses: they frame quoted lyrics the way karaoke subtitles do (♪ we will rock you ♪), decorate now-playing status messages, and mark musical moments in scripts and in captions for the deaf and hard of hearing, where ♪ conventionally signals that music is playing.
The full notation set lives elsewhere: the Musical Symbols block (U+1D100–1D1FF) holds the treble clef 𝄞 (U+1D11E), bass clef 𝄢, alto clef 𝄡, double flat 𝄫, double sharp 𝄪, and the staff-style note values 𝅝 𝅗𝅥 𝅘𝅥. These sit outside the Basic Multilingual Plane — the astral range above U+FFFF — so older apps, some fonts, and stripped-down text fields may show them as boxes or mangle them into pairs of junk characters. Modern phones and browsers handle them fine, but test before putting 𝄞 in a username, and keep the BMP notes ♪ ♫ as your fallback: they are the safest music characters in Unicode.
In running text the accidentals do real work. Writing F♯ with the sharp sign (U+266F) instead of F# with the number sign is the difference between typography and a shrug: the sharp's vertical strokes stand upright with slanted crossbars, while the hash leans the other way — the C# programming language actually spells its name with the number sign because ♯ was too hard to type. B♭ clarinet, E♭ major, a tune in A♮ — pasted accidentals make setlists, teaching materials, and liner notes look professional. The emoji set (🎵 🎶 🎼 and the instruments) plays the opposite role: full-color and loud, perfect for playlist links and captions.
♪ (eighth note) and ♫ (beamed eighth notes) are text characters: monochrome, font-sized, and safe in usernames and terminals since the 1990s. 🎵 and 🎶 are their emoji counterparts, drawn in color by each platform. Same musical meaning, different presentation — chats and captions usually take the emoji, while lyric quoting, subtitles, and plain-text contexts take ♪ and ♫.
♯ (U+266F) is the musical sharp: its vertical strokes are upright and its crossbars slant upward. # is the number sign, with the opposite geometry. They are unrelated characters — "C♯ major" uses the sharp, while the C# programming language officially uses the number sign because ♯ was impractical to type. In music writing, the sharp sign is the correct mark.
𝄞 lives at U+1D11E in the Musical Symbols block, beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane, and needs both a modern app and a font that covers that range. Current phones and browsers manage it; older Android builds, some Windows setups, and restrictive username fields do not. If it fails, there is no simpler twin — fall back to ♪ or the emoji 🎼.
Paste the accidental directly after the note letter with no space: B♭, F♯, E♭ major, A♮. The flat ♭ (U+266D), natural ♮ (U+266E), and sharp ♯ (U+266F) are ordinary text characters, so they match your font in emails, setlists, teaching handouts, and liner notes. The double accidentals 𝄫 and 𝄪 exist too, but need astral-plane font support.
On Windows, the two oldest notes have Alt codes inherited from the original PC character set: Alt+13 gives ♪ and Alt+14 gives ♫ (numeric keypad, in apps that accept them). On a Mac, open the Character Viewer with Ctrl+Cmd+Space and search "note." Everything else here — clefs, accidentals, staff-style notes — has no keystroke anywhere, which is why copy-paste is the standard route.