Music Symbols

History of musical notation symbols in Unicode

Musical notation has evolved over nearly a millennium, beginning with medieval Gregorian neumes before settling into the modern five-line staff system in seventeenth-century Europe. In digital typography, the earliest music symbols appeared in the IBM PC character set, which provided basic single and double eighth notes (♪ and ♫) for text screens. Unicode preserved these legacy glyphs in the Miscellaneous Symbols block (U+2669 through U+266F) and later introduced a dedicated Musical Symbols block spanning U+1D100 to U+1D1FF for professional music engraving.

Standard text fonts render the classic note characters reliably across all browsers, operating systems, and mobile phones. When adding musical flair to social media bios, video titles, or track listings, single notes like ♪ and beamed pairs like ♫ adapt naturally to your document's font size and color. You can pair these with decorative characters from our cool symbols collection or add soft aesthetic accents from aesthetic symbols to frame your song titles.

Keyboard shortcuts and alt codes for music notes

On Windows desktop keyboards equipped with a separate numeric keypad, typing basic musical notes takes only a moment using classic numeric alt codes. Hold down the Alt key and type 13 on the number pad to generate the eighth note ♪, or type Alt + 14 to insert the beamed eighth notes ♫. In Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer, you can also type the hexadecimal code point 266A followed by Alt + X to transform the code directly into ♪, or 266B followed by Alt + X for ♫.

On macOS, there is no default Option key combination for musical notes, but you can open the Character Viewer by pressing Control + Command + Space, type "music" in the search bar, and double-click your chosen symbol to insert it. For multi-colored digital icons, visit our emoji symbols guide to copy the musical note emoji 🎵 and multiple notes 🎶.

Distinguishing sharps, flats, and naturals

Many writers inadvertently substitute standard keyboard characters for formal musical accidentals, typing a pound sign (#) instead of the true sharp sign ♯ (U+266F) or a lowercase letter "b" instead of the flat sign ♭ (U+266D). While a hash mark works colloquially, authentic musical signs feature slanted crossbars and vertical stems engineered to align gracefully with musical pitch letters like C♯ or B♭. The natural sign ♮ (U+266E) cancels previous sharps or flats in a measure. In HTML documents, you can safely display these using the named character entities ♯ for ♯ and ♭ for ♭.