Music Note Symbols to Copy and Paste

Notes, accidentals and emoji

The grid starts with the four note shapes that have been in Unicode since version 1.1: ♩ quarter note, ♪ eighth note, ♫ two beamed eighth notes and ♬ beamed sixteenth notes. They are ordinary text, so they work in a username, a playlist title or a line of lyrics, and they take the color and size of the text around them.

Next come the three accidentals ♭ flat, ♮ natural and ♯ sharp. Use them in chord names like B♭ or F♯m, and in key names like E♭ major.

The rest are emoji: 🎵 and 🎶 for a song or a melody, 🎼 for sheet music, and the instruments 🎹 keyboard, 🎸 guitar, 🎻 violin, 🎷 saxophone, 🎺 trumpet, 🥁 drum, 🪕 banjo and 🪗 accordion, plus 🎤 and 🎧 for singing and listening. The newest, the accordion, arrived in Unicode 13.0 (2020); a device that hasn’t been updated since then may show it as a box.

Where each kind works best

Text notes are safest where emoji are filtered or look out of place: game names, forms and email subjects. Emoji suit social posts and messages, where people expect color. If a name field refuses the emoji, the text note usually gets through.

Writing music in plain text

For a chord chart in a message, write each chord with its accidental attached, like C♯m7 or A♭maj7, and keep a space between bars or use | as a bar line. Spell flats and sharps with the symbols rather than b and #, so that Bb no longer reads as two letters. The table below the grid lists each symbol’s HTML code, such as ♯ and ♭, for web pages.

Music: the 20 symbols and their codes

Names and code points from the Unicode Character Database, HTML codes from the HTML standard, and the Unicode version that first included each character. Where a symbol has a different, shorter name in Unicode’s emoji list, that name follows in brackets.