A few posts ago ('To Wee or not to Wee') I mentioned how our bath tub knobs made squealy noises and I attempted to play them like a musical instrument, much to the disdain of all other family members. The washers, or whatever, have still not been replaced and since I was home alone *palms pressed to cheeks with a surprised expression* yesterday, I got to try again. This time I only tried playing the scale. Here is the result-
Not too shabby, it does sort of sound like tonal scale, doesn't it? Oh come on! Use your imagination! It's not like there are keys or frets or anything at all, it's all by ear! Notice the little vibrato there at the end :) Yes, I'm proud of myself!
Solmization, or the practice of assigning syllables to the different 'steps' of the scale, originated in ancient India. Fast forward a few thousand years, when Isidore, the Archbishop of Seville during the sixth century, lamented that 'Unless sounds are remembered, they perish, for they cannot be written down'. A Benedictine monk who was also a master of music named Guido d'Arezzo set to work to prevent so many sacred tunes from being lost.
Brother Guido was familiar with solmization, and noted that most of the Gregorian chants popular at that time could easily be learned by singers if they could see the tone progression up and down the scale, and associate it with the sound. He assigned the notes of the scale—C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C—a syllable: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do. (We know what you're thinking: Yes, it actually is SOL—it's traditionally written that way when the tonic notes are spelled out, and often referred to as the 'sol-fa scale' colloquially—but that final L is hard to hear thanks to the LA that follows.)
Those weren’t just random sounds he chose; they came from 'Ut Queant Laxis', a well-known hymn of the Middle Ages that was chanted for vespers. Each succeeding line of the song started one note higher than the previous one, so Guido used the first letters of each word of each line: UT queant laxis, REsonare fibris: MIre gestorum , FAmuli tuorum: SOLve, etc. 'Ut' was eventually deemed too difficult pronounce and was changed to “Do' (Mental Floss)
The idea of the Guidonian hand is that each portion of the hand represents a specific note within the hexachord system, which spans nearly three octaves from "G ut" (that is, "Gamma ut") (the contraction of which is "Gamut", which can refer to the entire span) to "E la" (in other words, from the G at the bottom of the modern bass clef to the E at the top of the treble clef). In teaching, an instructor would indicate a series of notes by pointing to them on their hand, and the students would sing them. This is similar to the system of hand signals sometimes used in conjunction with solfege.
There have been a number of variations in the position of the notes on the hand, and no one variation is definitive but, as in the example below the notes of the gamut were mentally superimposed onto the joints and tips of the fingers of the left hand. Thus "gamma ut" (two Gs below middle C) was the tip of the thumb, A ("A re") was the inside of the thumb knuckle, B ("B mi") was the joint at the base of the thumb, C ("C fa ut") was the joint at the base of the index finger, and so on, spiraling around the hand counterclockwise past middle C ("C sol fa ut") until the D a ninth above middle C ("D la sol") (the middle joint of the middle finger) and the E above that ("E la") (the back of that joint, the only note on the back of the hand) were reached.
This device allowed people to visualize where the half steps of the gamut were, and to visualize the interlocking positions of the hexachords (the names of which—ut re mi fa sol la—were taken from the hymn Ut queant laxis). The Guidonian hand was reproduced in numerous medieval treatises.'
(Wikipedia)