Guido d'Arezzo and "movable Ut"

Almost a thousand years ago, Guido d'Arezzo invented the idea of teaching novice singers to "sight read written music." Before then, a singer had to *memorize* every chant in the Church's canon. To support his radical idea, Guido developed new technology (the musical staff and solfeggio) and new pedagogy (such as the hymn Ut queant laxis, which facilitated learning solfeggio). Using these innovations, Guido cut the time needed to train a competent singer from ten years to "one, or at most two" -- an efficiency gain of at least 5:1, and perhaps 10:1.

Bill Sethares was kind enough to loan me book with English translations of Guido's surviving writings. This book is so out-of-print that neither Amazon nor Google Books has it. Guido's writing make it exceedingly clear that his staff did NOT denote pitches, but rather denoted the same thing that the iGetIt! staff denotes: intervals-from-Do (or Ut, as Guido called it).

As the translator, Dr. Dolores Pesce, summarized (p. 23): "For Guido, D as a sounding pitch is not fixed, but D as a notational symbol has a very fixed meaning--its intervallic context."

That is, D did not denote a pitch (frequency); it denoted the same thing that Re denotes in "moveable Do with a La-based minor:" the note that is the center of symmetry in the diatonic scale. Guido denoted intervals, not pitches--just as does the iGetIt! Music System (formerly known as the ThumMusic System). This is not an interpretation; Guido says this very clearly in his own words (albeit in terms of a hexachordal system that, unlike the iGetIt! Music System, doesn't temper out the syntonic comma, and is hence much more complicated).

Why did music notation evolve towards notating pitches? I don't have a good reference for this, but in a nutshell the answer is: instruments. Guido's notation was intended for unaccompanied singers, for whom changes of key were trivially easy.  Heck, for singers the tough problem isn't changing keys, it's staying in any one key. A person's natural tendency is to sing flatter and flatter as one's vocal muscles tire.

But instruments are different. To make instrumental sight-reading possible, each note-head on the staff needs to correspond to a particular instrument-control gesture, and for most instruments, that gesture is different for every pitch, so pitches--not intervals--need to be notated for musical instruments.

Point being: the iGetIt! Music System is doing it "old school" -- very old school. We can do this because a performer using an isomorphic button-field, combined with electronic transposition, can easily play a piece in any given key...just as Guido's singers could.

We're bringing music notation back to the future.

It just goes to show that, as Guido would have said, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (except, of course that he would have said it in Latin).