music symbols
Music note symbols
Notes, rests, accidentals and clefs, plus the instrument emoji.
26 symbols · tap any one to copy
Music
For playlist names, Spotify and SoundCloud profiles, karaoke lyrics posts, and marking the song someone has stuck in their head.
The everyday notes ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ live in Miscellaneous Symbols between U+2669 and U+266C, and their official names are more precise than most people assume. ♩ is a crotchet, ♪ a quaver, ♫ two quavers beamed together, and ♬ two semiquavers beamed. Unicode uses the American names in the character descriptions, but the shapes are the same ones you would meet in any British music lesson, and they were encoded so that text about music could show a note without embedding an image.
The accidentals are where a genuinely useful distinction hides. ♯ is the musical sharp sign, and it is not the hash symbol, however similar they look at small sizes. Look closely and you will see the difference in the strokes: the sharp has two upright vertical stems with slanted crossbars, while the number sign has slanted verticals and level crossbars. That is not decorative fussiness, it is how a typesetter tells them apart. Writing a song title as C♯ minor rather than C# minor is the difference between notation and an approximation.
♭ and ♮ complete the set, and both suffer from the same substitution problem. People type a lowercase b for a flat because it is on the keyboard, which reads acceptably in a chat message and badly anywhere it matters. The natural sign ♮ has no keyboard lookalike at all, so it is usually just left out.
The clefs are a different animal. 𝄞 𝄡 𝄢 come from the Musical Symbols block starting at U+1D100, which sits above the Basic Multilingual Plane. In practical terms that means each one is stored as a surrogate pair, so systems that count storage units rather than characters will read a single treble clef as two, and a fair number of username validators reject anything from that range outright. It is also the least well covered part of this page in older fonts.
Worth being honest about the limits: you cannot write actual sheet music with these. The block was encoded so that catalogues, dictionaries and academic text could refer to musical notation, not so that notes could be placed on a stave. Unicode gives you the symbols in a row, with no way to stack them vertically or attach them to lines, so anything beyond a decorative note in a playlist title needs real notation software.
Common questions
Is ♯ the same as the hash symbol?
No. They are separate characters with different shapes: the musical sharp has upright vertical stems and slanted crossbars, the number sign is the other way round. They also sort and search differently, so a song title typed with a hash will not match a search for the properly written sharp.
Why does the treble clef 𝄞 show as a box or get rejected?
It comes from the Musical Symbols block above the basic plane, which many older fonts do not cover and many name fields refuse. Nothing is broken in your copy, the receiving system simply has no glyph or no permission for that range. The simple notes ♪ and ♫ are far more widely supported.
Can I write sheet music with these symbols?
Not really. They were encoded so that written text could refer to notation, not so that music could be typeset, and plain text gives you no way to place a note on a stave or stack symbols vertically. For anything beyond a decorative note in a title you need proper notation software.
Which music symbols work in a Spotify or SoundCloud name?
The text notes ♪ ♫ ♬ ♩ and the accidentals ♭ ♯ are the reliable ones, since they have been in system fonts for decades and stay the colour of the surrounding text. The instrument emoji generally work too but render differently on each platform, so a name that looks balanced on iOS may not on Android.