Which music note is which
♩ is a quarter note, one beat in 4/4 time. ♪ is an eighth note, half a beat; the little flag halves the length. ♫ is two eighth notes joined by a beam, and ♬ is two sixteenth notes joined by a double beam. In everyday use they all just say "music", but now you know which one fits a real rhythm.
For sheet-music values, the notation characters go further: 𝅝 whole note (four beats), 𝅗𝅥 half note (two beats), 𝅘𝅥 quarter, 𝅘𝅥𝅮 eighth and 𝅘𝅥𝅯 sixteenth, plus a matching rest for each. Clefs, sharps and flats are on the music symbols page.
Text notes vs emoji notes
♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ have been in Unicode since version 1.1 and work in almost every font. They are text, so they take on your font color, which looks clean in song titles, lyric captions, "♪ now playing" lines and bios. 🎵 and 🎶 are the colorful emoji versions, better for chats.
The sheet-music notes come from the Musical Symbols block added in Unicode 3.1. Fewer fonts include them, so they may show as boxes on some phones. Notes like 𝅘𝅥 are also stored as a note head plus a stem, so a character counter may count them as two.
How to type a music note
On Windows, hold Alt and type 13 on the number pad for ♪ or 14 for ♫. This uses the old DOS code page, so it works in many programs but not all. In Word, type 266B and press Alt + X for ♫.
On a Mac, press Control + Command + Space and search for "note". On iPhone and Android, the emoji keyboard has 🎵 and 🎶; for the text notes, copy them from this page. In HTML, ♪ gives ♪ and ♫ gives ♫. For volume and speaker icons, see the sound symbol page.