Guido d'Arezzo

Guido of Arezzo was a Benedictine monk and music teacher in northern Italy. He worked out a way to write pitches on a set of horizontal lines, the staff, so singers could learn a melody from the page instead of only by ear. He also devised solmization, the do-re-mi system of naming notes, using syllables drawn from a hymn. These tools cut the time needed to train church singers and became the foundation of Western musical notation. His exact birth and death years are not firmly recorded.