Music Symbols

Where these characters come from

The common notes and accidentals sit in Miscellaneous Symbols; the fuller notation set lives in its own Musical Symbols block, encoded so scores could be represented as text.

How reliably they render

The everyday notes and flat, natural and sharp signs are widely available. The full notation block is specialised and frequently missing outside dedicated music software.

Questions

The sharp sign is not a hash

Three characters get confused here constantly. The musical sharp ♯ (U+266F) has two vertical strokes drawn straight and two horizontals that slant upwards. The number sign # (U+0023) is the reverse: slanted verticals, level horizontals. The similarity is coincidence rather than shared ancestry — the sharp evolved from a squared-off b used in medieval notation to cancel a flat, while the number sign descends from a shorthand for the Latin libra. In casual prose nobody notices, but in writing about music the wrong one is conspicuous, and the two sort and search as entirely different characters.

Why you cannot build notation out of these

The notes in Miscellaneous Symbols are complete pictures rather than components: ♪ is one indivisible glyph, not a head plus a stem plus a flag. Unicode encoded them that way because they were meant for use in ordinary sentences — a paragraph that mentions a quaver — rather than for typesetting music. The dedicated Musical Symbols block does separate the parts, but those characters assume software that can position them vertically on a staff. A line of text has one baseline and no vertical placement, which is the reason no amount of clever character choice will produce a readable score.

Code points and HTML entities

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