Seven characters, three pages
The music wing is small on purpose, because the usable repertoire is small. Every music character that pastes reliably into ordinary text sits in one unbroken run from U+2669 to U+266F: four notes and three accidentals. The grid above is not a sample of the wing. It is the wing.
- Music note symbols — the four notes, U+2669 to U+266C, including why ♫ and ♬ are plural names that draw two notes each, and why there is no rest character among them.
- Sharp and flat symbols — U+266D, U+266E and U+266F,
how to tell ♯ from the hash key by general category, and the HTML entities
♭,♮and♯. - Sheet music symbols — the 233 notation characters Unicode does encode, listed by codepoint, and the encoding rule that keeps them out of ordinary text.
The treble clef is not one of them
The treble clef is U+1D11E MUSICAL SYMBOL G CLEF. It exists, it is properly specified, and it is above U+FFFF, which means four bytes in UTF-8 instead of three. A store or field built to accept a maximum of three bytes per character rejects it or truncates the text at that point, with no warning at the keyboard. The same goes for every rest, every time signature, the crescendo and decrescendo hairpins, and the dynamics from U+1D18F MUSICAL SYMBOL PIANO to U+1D191 MUSICAL SYMBOL FORTE. That is the whole subject of the sheet music page, and it is the reason this wing has three pages rather than thirty.
The seven are not as uniform as they look
Sitting in one run does not make them consistent. Six of the seven are general category
So, other symbol; ♯ alone is Sm, a maths symbol, so a filter written
around \p{Sm} catches the sharp and misses the flat next to it. East Asian Width splits
them differently again: ♩, ♪, ♬, ♭ and ♯ are Ambiguous while ♫ and
♮ are Neutral, so in a monospace column set to treat Ambiguous as double-width, five take two
cells and two take one.
What to reach for
For a note in a title or a message, ♪. For a pair, ♫. For a key or a chord name, ♭ and ♯. For anything that needs a stave, a picture. If you came here from the index, the other two wings are maths and science and the general reference.