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Look at the opening line of any piece of sheet music . Five parallel lines , with notes sitting on and between them . And six syllables almost every musician knows : Do , Re , Mi , Fa , Sol , La. A Benedictine monk named Guido of Arezzo put that system together around 1025 in central Italy . Before Guido , learning a new chant was an act of pure memorisation . A trained singer might spend several months mastering a single piece by ear . Guido , who was teaching the choir at Arezzo Cathedral , wanted to cut that time drastically . His solution came from a Latin hymn dedicated to Saint John the Baptist , the " Ut queant laxis . " Each of the hymn 's six phrases began on a successively higher note of the scale . Guido borrowed the opening syllable of each phrase : Ut , Re , Mi , Fa , Sol , La. He assigned them to those six pitches . He also developed the four - line staff , placing notes at precise heights . A singer could now see the interval between any two notes at a glance . A choir member could now sight - read a melody heard for the first time , without a teacher present . Guido himself claimed the learning time for a new chant dropped from years to weeks . The system spread rapidly through European monasteries and cathedrals . " Ut " was eventually replaced by the smoother " Do , " and a seventh syllable , " Si , " was added for the leading note . Those medieval decisions are still embedded in every conservatoire , every classroom , and every piece of printed music today .
