With the development of musical culture, the ways of recording sounds and compositions have changed. Many centuries passed before mankind came to a single form of their recording, which made it possible to fix sounds on paper using special conventional signs.
Notes are a graphic representation of musical sounds. The whole essence of this concept lies in the history of their creation. It is possible to find an answer to the question of what the notes are only by relying on historical facts.
There were times when music was not recorded. Chants and songs were transmitted by ear, from mouth to mouth. But the moment came when people decided to start recording them, so that the descendants who own musical notation and have an ear for music could perform their favorite music and songs even after several centuries. To do this, they came up with notes - signs that show the pitch and duration of a sound.
Many generations on different continents have created their own ways of recording musical works. It was difficult to compare them, because they were very different. In Ancient Babylon, there was a syllabic notation using cuneiform. In ancient Egypt, melodies were recorded through drawings. In ancient Greece, the letters of the Latin alphabet were used. Already in the Middle Ages in Russia, people began to use graphic schemes consisting of dots, dashes and commas, located above the verbal text and indicating the movements of the voice that were necessary in order to reproduce a musical work. These conventional schemes formed the basis of hook or znamenny writing in Russia, which is a kind of deranged musical notation - a visual depiction of the melodic line of a work.
Later in Western Europe, music began to be recorded using one or two horizontal lines. Along with the letter, color designation was introduced for the notes. Red or yellow color determined the pitch of the sounds. This is how the linear form of musical notation was gradually born, combining the pitch of sounds and the clarity of neums.
In the 11th century, musical notation was significantly improved by Guido d'Arezzo. He proposed to write notes on a musical line containing four horizontal straight lines, which were combined into a single system. Subsequently, it became the prototype of the modern music staff, and the letter symbolism of the heights of the lines was transformed into keys - conventional graphic signs that determine the height of the located notes. Moreover, they should have been placed both on the lines themselves and between them. In addition, Guido d'Arezzo is the creator of the syllable names of 6 notes - "ut", "re", "mi", "fa", "sol", "la". But at the end of the 16th century, there were seven notes. “Ut” was replaced with “C” and a note syllable was added for the sound “si”. These names are still used today.
Later, the musical notation was improved and changed. It became clearer, clearer designations for pauses were introduced. The notes from squares turned into round ones, they had musical notes - vertical lines denoting the duration of sounds. For the same purpose, they were either painted over entirely, or left unpainted. A stave appeared, consisting of five note lines. Finally, the musical notation took on a modern form. But the music is limitless. With the development of new musical forms, musical notation changes and improves.
