Displaying music beams using the unicode standard

Question

The Unicode Standard version 6.3 specifies character codes for music in the range 1D00-1DFF. Two of these are 1D173 (Begin Beam) and 1D174 (End Beam).

Is the purpose of these character codes for specifying the ligature start and end points of a beam in the resulting output? If so, what's required to achieve the desired output?

Below is an example of beamed notes created using musescore:

Answer 1

Yes, the purpose of these characters (which have been in Unicode since version 3.1) explicitly says, in Ch. 15 (p. 537): “Extensive ligature-like beams are used frequently in musical notation between groups of notes having short values. The practice is widespread and very predictable, so it is therefore amenable to algorithmic handling. The format characters U+1D173 musical symbol begin beam and U+1D174 musical symbol end beam can be used to indicate the extents of beam groupings.”.

What you need is rendering software that implements this and a font that contains suitable ligature characters. You may also need commands or markup or style sheet that requests for the use of ligatures. In practice, you probably won’t find these, except perhaps in specialized music software.