Solfège

Syllables are assigned to the notes of the scale and assist the musician in audiating, or mentally hearing, the pitches of a piece of music, often for the purpose of singing them aloud.

[5] In eleventh-century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo invented a notational system that named the six notes of the hexachord after the first syllable of each line of the Latin hymn "Ut queant laxis", the "Hymn to St. John the Baptist", yielding ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.

Ut queant laxīs    resonāre fibrīs Mīra gestōrum    famulī tuōrum, Solve pollūtī    labiī reātum, Sancte Iohannēs.

They translate as: So that your servants may with loosened voices Resound the wonders of your deeds, Clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John.

In Anglophone countries, "si" was changed to "ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter.

This mixed-origin theory was brought forward by scholars as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the works of Francisci a Mesgnien Meninski and Jean-Benjamin de La Borde.

This Edmund probably sang to the tune of Fa, So, La, Ti (e.g. F, G, A, B in C major), i.e. an ascending sequence of three whole tones with an ominous feel to it: see tritone (historical uses).

One particularly important variant of movable do, but differing in some respects from the system described below, was invented in the nineteenth century by Sarah Ann Glover, and is known as tonic sol-fa.

In Italy, in 1972, Roberto Goitre wrote the famous method "Cantar leggendo", which has come to be used for choruses and for music for young children.

The pedagogical advantage of the movable-Do system is its ability to assist in the theoretical understanding of music; because a tonic is established and then sung in comparison to, the student infers melodic and chordal implications through their singing.

When the Paris Conservatoire was founded at the turn of the nineteenth century, its solfège textbooks adhered to the conventions of Italian solfeggio, solidifying the use of Fixed doh in Romance cultures[14] In the major Romance and Slavic languages, the syllables Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and Si are the ordinary names of the notes, in the same way that the letters C, D, E, F, G, A, and B are used to name notes in English.

For native speakers of these languages, solfège is simply singing the names of the notes, omitting any modifiers such as "sharp" or "flat" to preserve the rhythm.

In Germanic countries, on the other hand, the notes have letter names that are mainly the same as those used in English (so that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is said to be in "d-Moll"), and solfège syllables are encountered only in sight-singing and ear training.