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Key signatures indicate which notes are to be played as sharps or flats in the music that follows, showing up to seven sharps or flats. Notes that are shown as sharp or flat in a key signature will be played that way in every octave—e.g., a key signature with a B ♭ indicates that every B is played as a B ♭.
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 at the beginning of the first line.
The flat symbol (♭) is used in two ways: It is placed in key signatures to mark lines whose notes are flattened throughout that section of music; it may also be an "accidental" that precedes an individual note and indicates that the note should be lowered temporarily, until the following bar line.
A key signature with no sharps or flats generally indicates A minor or C major, using all natural notes with no sharps or flats. The natural sign is derived from a square b used to denote B ♮ in medieval music (in contrast with the round b denoting B ♭, which became the flat symbol).
Following the clef, the key signature is a group of 0 to 7 sharp or flat signs placed on the staff to indicate the key of the piece or song by specifying that certain notes are sharp or flat throughout the piece, unless otherwise indicated with accidentals added before certain notes.
(Such key signatures are used for so-called theoretical keys which are almost never encountered outside music-theoretical exercises.) [b] Keys with 6 flats and 6 sharps, [c] with 7 flats and 5 sharps [d] and with 5 flats and 7 sharps [e] are enharmonic to one another. Composers will, in most (though not all) cases, choose only one key from each ...
When a musical key or key signature is referred to in a language other than English, that language may use the usual notation used in English (namely the letters A to G, along with translations of the words sharp, flat, major and minor in that language): languages which use the English system include Irish, Welsh, Hindi, Japanese (based on katakana in iroha order), Korean (based on hangul in ...
The staff below has a key signature with three sharps (A major or its relative minor, F ♯ minor). The sharp symbol placed on the note indicates that it is an A ♯ instead of an A ♮ . In twelve-tone equal temperament tuning (the predominant system of tuning in Western music), raising a note's pitch by a semitone results in a note that is ...