Guido of Arezzo
Guido of Arezzo or Guido Monaco (995-1050) is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation (staff notation) that replaced neumatic notation.
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.
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Categories: Benedictines