Guido of Arezzo

Guido was a monk of the Benedictine order from the Italian city-state of Arezzo. He noted the difficulty that singers had in remembering Gregorian chants.

He developed new technologies for teaching, including the staff notation and the "do-re-mi" (Diatonic) scale, in which the name of the single notes were taken from the initial syllables of the seven verses of a hymn, Ut queant laxis (at the beginning, "do" was called "ut").

The simple placement of lines allowed those reading musical notation to know where on the scale a particular note should be sung, moving from a relative scale (useful to those needing a reminder of where to sing) to an absolute scale.

GUIDO, a music notation format for computer representation of musical scores, was named after Guido of Arezzo.

See also