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The sound colours

Each step of the scale has its own colour and shape. Home (do) is always the red circle, in every key.

  1. docircle
  2. resquare
  3. mitriangle
  4. fadiamond
  5. solstar
  6. laupside-down triangle
  7. tiplus

A thousand-year-old song

Around the year 1025, a monk named Guido of Arezzo noticed that each line of an old hymn, Ut queant laxis, starts one note higher than the last: Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La. Singers have used those syllables ever since (Ut later became do).

In England, Sarah Glover taught children to sing with these syllables in the 1840s; John Curwen built on her method and gave each syllable a hand sign (1870). In Hungary, Zoltán Kodály built them into the way children learn to sing.