Shape note
Shapes were added to the noteheads in written music to help singers find pitches within major and minor scales without the use of more complex information found in key signatures on the staff.
Such systems use as their syllables the note names "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do" (familiar to most people due to the song "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music).
A few books (e.g. "The Good Old Songs" by C. H. Cayce) present the older seven-note syllabification of "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si, do".
[3] A controlled study on the usefulness of shape notes was carried out in the 1950s by George H. Kyme with an experimental population consisting of fourth- and fifth-graders living in California.
Kyme took care to match his experimental and control groups as closely as possible for ability, quality of teacher, and various other factors.
Modulation is sometimes said to be problematic for shape-note systems, since the shapes employed for the original key of the piece no longer match the scale degrees of the new key; [5] but the ability to use of sharp and flat symbols along with shape notes is a matter of the range of sorts available to the typographer and musical preferences.
The 9th edition of the Bay Psalm Book was printed with the initials of four-note syllables (fa, sol, la, me) underneath the staff.
In his book, Tufts substituted the initials of the four-note syllables on the staff in place of note heads, and indicated rhythm by punctuation marks to the right of the letters.
[13] In 1803 Andrew Law published The Musical Primer, which used slightly different shapes: a square indicated fa and a triangle la, while sol and mi were the same as in Little and Smith.
Additionally, Law's invention was more radical than Little and Smith's in that he dispensed with the use of the staff altogether, letting the shapes be the sole means of expressing pitch.
Some copies of The Easy Instructor, Part II (1803) included a statement, on the verso of the title page, in which John Connelly (whose name is given in other sources as Conly, Connolly, and Coloney) grants permission to Little and Smith to make use in their publications of the shape notes to which he claimed the rights.
Shape notes proved popular in America, and quickly a wide variety of hymnbooks were prepared making use of them.
Jesse B. Aikin was the first to produce a book with a seven-shape note system, and he vigorously defended his "invention" and his patent.
Two books that have remained in continuous (though limited) use, William Walker's Christian Harmony and M. L. Swan's New Harp of Columbia, are still available.
In addition, nondenominational community singings are also intermittently held which feature early- to mid-20th century seven-shape gospel music such as Stamps-Baxter hymnals or Heavenly Highway.
Among the four-shape systems, the Southern Harmony has remained in continuous use at one singing in Benton, Kentucky, and is now experiencing a small amount of regrowth.
