Where Solfège comes from

Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. Almost everyone knows these syllables. They were invented about a thousand years ago by an Italian monk who was tired of how long it took to teach singers new songs.

Guido of Arezzo

Guido was a Benedictine monk born around the year 991. In his time, choirs learned chants by ear, one song at a time, and it took years to build up a repertoire. Guido wanted singers to be able to read a new melody and sing it on sight.

He is also credited with improving musical notation: placing notes on lines and spaces so their height shows their pitch. That idea grew into the five-line staff musicians use today.

A hymn that climbs

To help singers remember the notes, Guido used a hymn to Saint John the Baptist, Ut queant laxis. Each line of its melody starts one step higher than the line before, and he took the first syllable of each line:

Ut queant laxis · Resonare fibris · Mira gestorum · Famuli tuorum · Solve polluti · Labii reatum

Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la: six notes. A singer who knew the hymn could find any of them by memory.

From ut to do

Two changes came later. A seventh syllable, si, was added from the hymn's last line, Sancte Iohannes. In the 1600s ut was replaced by do, which is easier to sing; the change is usually credited to the Italian music theorist Giovanni Battista Doni. In English-speaking countries si later became ti, so every note starts with a different letter.

Singing on these syllables is called solfège, or solfeggio in Italian.

And the "Solfeggio frequencies"?

Online you will find lists of "Solfeggio frequencies" such as 396, 417 and 528 Hz, often described as ancient healing tones. They are not part of Guido's system. Medieval singers had no fixed pitch in hertz at all; the standard tuning note A = 440 Hz was only agreed in the 20th century. These numbers come from modern writers in the late 20th century.

That does not mean they are unpleasant to listen to. Many people enjoy them for relaxation or meditation. But claims that they heal the body are traditional or modern beliefs, not established science.

Try them

The Healing freqs knob on SeeSound plays these tones as pure sine waves, so you can hear them and see how each one draws in 3D Space and on the Cymatics plate.