Guidonian hand

It depicts three consecutive and overlapping hexachords (i.e., six-tone scales), starting with the thumb, continuing across the base of the fingers, up the pinkie, across the fingertips, down the index finger, over the middle to the ring finger, then back to the middle finger and up to its tip.

Some form of the device may have been used by Guido of Arezzo, a medieval music theorist who wrote a number of treatises, including one instructing singers in sightreading. The hand occurs in some manuscripts before Guido's time as a tool to find the semitone; it does not have the depicted form until the 12th century.

Guido of Arezzo's alleged development of the Guidonian hand, more than a hundred years after his death, allowed musicians to label a specific joint or fingertip with the gamut (also referred to as the hexachord in the modern era).

His staff added two additional lines, which made it vastly easier to write music. He also developed the "Guidonian hand" and the first solfege system (which became the "do re mi fa so la ti do" familiar today) to help singers read and learn the sounds of music.

Solfege, also called “solfeggio” or “solfa,” is a system where every note of a scale is given its own unique syllable, which is used to sing that note every time it appears.

Organum (/ˈɔːrɡənəm/) is, in general, a plainchant melody with at least one added voice to enhance the harmony, developed in the Middle Ages.

The Guidonian Hand was a Medieval mnemonic device to help singers - mostly monks and nuns - in their learning and memorization of hymns and masses.

The system that predominates in European music was introduced by an 11th-century Italian monk, Guido of Arezzo, who derived it from a Latin hymn, “Ut queant laxis,” the first six lines of which begin on successively higher notes of the scale.

Guido of Arezzo He is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation(staff notation) that replaced neumatic notation; his text, the Micrologus, was the second-most widely distributed treatise on music in the Middle Ages (after the writings of Boethius).

Solfege is a system of notation in which every note of a scale is given a specific syllable that is always said for that note. For example, a C major scale has a specific set of letters that are played in order – C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C.

One of the benefits of solfege singing is that it can help musicians develop a more intuitive understanding of music theory. By learning the solfege syllables and how they relate to the different notes of the scale, musicians can develop a better sense of how chords, melodies, and harmonies work together.

More specifically, the word organum refers to a polyphonic style of sacred chanting that flourished in Europe from 8th to 13th century and the term melismatic indicates a vocal line in which there are several notes sung on the same syllable (melisma).