Music Note Symbol ♪ Copy & Paste

About Music Note Symbol

Musical symbols in Unicode come from two main sources. The basic music notes — quarter note ♩ (U+2669), eighth note ♪ (U+266A), beamed eighth notes ♫ (U+266B), and beamed sixteenth notes ♬ (U+266C) — were included in the Miscellaneous Symbols block in Unicode 1.1. They represent what publishers needed to insert music references in plain text. The accidentals — flat ♭ (U+266D), natural ♮ (U+266E), and sharp ♯ (U+266F) — represent the fundamental modifiers in Western music notation.

The Unicode Musical Symbols block (U+1D100–U+1D1FF), added in Unicode 3.1 (2001), encodes the complete set of symbols used in traditional Western music notation — clefs, time signatures, note values from maxima to 1024th note, dynamics, ornaments, and more. However, most of this extended block remains poorly supported in common fonts, which is why music typesetting software like Sibelius and Finale uses proprietary font encoding rather than these Unicode characters.

In digital culture, the eighth note ♪ and paired notes ♫ have become ubiquitous symbols for 'music' in general. They appear in streaming service interfaces, music player apps, social media posts about songs, karaoke captions, and in messaging to quote lyrics. The simplicity of these symbols — notes on a stem — is recognizable globally regardless of whether the viewer has any formal musical training.