Music symbols: notes, clefs and instruments

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ and ♭ ♮ ♯ sit in Unicode’s Miscellaneous Symbols block and have been part of the standard since version 1.1 in 1993. They are plain text with no emoji form, so they take the colour, size and weight of the words around them, and nearly every phone, laptop and app has a font that draws them. For a bio that has to look right everywhere, they are the safe choice.

The clefs, rests and score marks come from a separate Musical Symbols block, added in 2001 for quoting musical notation inside ordinary text. It holds more than 200 characters, but a phone can only show them if one of its fonts covers the block, and some older phones have none, so 𝄞 can turn into an empty box. The emoji came later still, in waves, and the newest ones are the likeliest to fail.

The sharp sign and the number sign only look alike. In ♯ the two upright strokes stand straight and the crossbars climb to the right; in # the crossbars are level and the uprights usually lean. Musicians notice, so a key written F♯ minor looks right where F# minor looks typed in a hurry. Flats work the same way: E♭ reads as E flat at a glance, while Eb can pass for a typo.

There is a practical side on Instagram too. Hashtags are built from the ordinary #, so ♯pianocover is just text that nobody will reach through a tag search. Use ♯ and ♭ when you write keys and chords, and keep # for tags.

A popular bio and caption decoration is a pretend music player: a progress bar, two time stamps and a row of buttons, all typed as text. The bar uses box-drawing lines, heavy ━ for the part already played and light ─ for the rest, with ● as the playhead. The buttons are ◁ ❚❚ ▷, with ⇆ and ↻ standing in for shuffle and repeat.

Those plain shapes are chosen on purpose. ⏸ ⏹ ⏺ ⏮ ⏭ ⏯ and ▶ are text characters that phones often redraw as emoji buttons, so a line built from them can be a row of coloured squares on one phone and thin outlines on another. The copies in the grid ask for the emoji version. When a line has to stay plain, build it from ◁ ▷ and ❚❚, which have no emoji form at all.

• ılıılı is not a special symbol. It alternates ı, the dotless i from the Turkish alphabet, with a lowercase l, which is why it looks like a waveform.
• ▁▂▃▅▆▇ are block elements, each a set fraction of a line’s height, so they climb like a volume meter.
• The voice-note wave •၊၊||၊|။ borrows ၊ and ။, two punctuation marks from the Myanmar (Burmese) script, for its short and tall bars.

Tip: Screen readers announce emoji by their full descriptions. Apple’s VoiceOver reads 🔂 as “clockwise circle arrows with circled one representing media playback repeat of single track”, so a row of player buttons takes a while to hear. Keep anything people need, such as opening hours or prices, out of these lines.

• Lead with what you play. One clef or instrument at the start of a bio tells visitors your subject before they read a word: 𝄞 for piano or voice, 𝄢 for bass, cello or bassoon, 🥁 for drums.
• Use a single note as a separator between short facts, as in “teacher ♪ arranger ♪ choir director”. Keep to one style per line: text notes or emoji, not both.
• Text notes suit a calm, minimal profile because they match your font. Instrument emoji are louder but say more, and 🎸 or 🎻 needs no translation.
• Symbols can’t go in an Instagram username, which takes only a–z, 0–9, dots and underscores. The name field and the bio take them without complaint.