music Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspe ...

, sharp, dièse (from

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

), or diesis (from Greek) means, "higher in pitch". More specifically, in

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation f ...

, sharp means "higher in pitch by one

semitone A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically. It is defined as the interval between two adjacent no ...

(half step)". Sharp is the opposite of flat, which is a lowering of pitch. A sharp symbol, , is used in

key signature In Western musical notation, a key signature is a set of sharp (), flat (), or rarely, natural () symbols placed on the staff at the beginning of a section of music. The initial key signature in a piece is placed immediately after the clef a ...

s or as an accidental. For instance, the music below has a key signature with three sharps (indicating either

A major A major (or the key of A) is a major scale based on A, with the pitches A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Its key signature has three sharps. Its relative minor is F-sharp minor and its parallel minor is A minor. The key of A major is the only k ...

or F minor, the relative minor) and the note, A, has a sharp accidental. :

Under twelve-tone equal temperament, B, for instance, sounds the same as, or is enharmonically equivalent to, C

natural Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans ar ...

(C), and E is enharmonically equivalent to F. In other tuning systems, such enharmonic equivalences in general do not exist. To allow extended

just intonation In music, just intonation or pure intonation is the tuning of musical intervals as whole number ratios (such as 3:2 or 4:3) of frequencies. An interval tuned in this way is said to be pure, and is called a just interval. Just intervals (and ...

, composer

Ben Johnston Ben Johnston may refer to: * Ben Johnston (rugby union) (born 1978), British rugby player * Ben Johnston (composer) (1926–2019), American contemporary composer of concert music * Bennett Johnston, Jr. (born 1932), Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist ...

uses a sharp to indicate a note is raised 70.6

cent Cent may refer to: Currency * Cent (currency), a one-hundredth subdivision of several units of currency * Penny (Canadian coin), a Canadian coin removed from circulation in 2013 * 1 cent (Dutch coin), a Dutch coin minted between 1941 and 1944 * ...

s (ratio 25:24), or a flat to indicate a note is lowered 70.6 cents. In intonation, sharp can also mean "slightly higher in pitch" (by some unspecified amount). If two simultaneous notes are slightly out-of-tune, the higher-pitched one (assuming the lower one is properly pitched) is "sharp" with respect to the other. Furthermore, the verb ''sharpen'' means to raise the pitch of a note, typically by a small musical interval.

Variants

Double sharps are indicated by the symbol and raise a note by two

s, or one whole tone. They should not be confused with a ghost note which is notated with "X". Historically, in order to lower a double sharp by one semitone to a sharp, it would be denoted as a . In modern notation the natural sign is often omitted. :

Less often (in for instance

microtonal music Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones— intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of ...

notation) a score indicates other types of sharps. A half sharp, or demisharp raises a note by a

quarter tone A quarter tone is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale or an interval about half as wide (aurally, or logarithmically) as a semitone, which itself is half a whole tone. Quarter tones divide the octave by 50 cents each ...

= 50 cents (), and may be marked with various symbols including . A sharp-and-a-half, three-quarter-tone sharp, or sesquisharp, raises a note by three quarter tones = 150 cents () and may be denoted . :

Although very uncommon, a triple sharp () can sometimes be found. It raises a note by three semitones, or a whole tone and a semitone.

Order of sharps

The order of sharps in

notation is F, C, G, D, A, E, B, each extra sharp being added successively in the following sequence of major keys: C→G→D→A→E→B→F→C. (These are sometimes learned using an

acrostic An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the ''first'' letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the F ...

phrase as a

mnemonic A mnemonic ( ) device, or memory device, is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory for better understanding. Mnemonics make use of elaborative encoding, retrieval cues, and image ...

, for example: Father Can Grab Dogs At Evenings Best or Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle or Father Christmas Gave Dad An Electric Blanket or Fat Cows Go Down And Eat Buttercups.) Similarly the order of flats is based on the same natural notes in reverse order: B, E, A, D, G, C, F Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles's Father or Blanket Exploded And Dad Got Cold Feet, encountered in the following series of major keys: C→F→B→E→A→D→G→C. In the above progression, the key of C major (with seven sharps) may be more conveniently written as the harmonically equivalent key D major (with five flats), and likewise C major (with seven flats) may be more conveniently written as B major (with five sharps). Nonetheless, it is possible to extend the order of sharp keys yet further, through C→G→D→A→E→B→F→C, adding the double-sharped notes F, C, G, D, A, E and finally B, and similarly for the flat keys from C major to C major, but with progressively decreasing convenience and usage.

Correctly drawing and displaying the sharp sign

The sharp symbol () resembles the number (hash) sign (#). Both signs have two sets of parallel double-lines. However, a correctly drawn sharp sign has two slanted parallel lines that rise from left to right, to avoid obscuring the staff lines. The number sign, in contrast, has two completely horizontal strokes in this place. In addition, while the sharp also always has two perfectly vertical lines, the number sign (#) may or may not contain perfectly vertical lines (according to typeface and writing style).

Unicode

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, assigned sharp signs are as follows: * * * * *

Notes

References