iSound

The American tradition of shape-note singing goes back to the "singing schools" of Colonial New England. Teachers, whose qualifications more often than not were enthusiasm and self-instruction, travelled the countryside, staying a week or two in each town to of instruct young men and women in part-singing.

These itinerant masters taught a musical scale represented by the sequence of syllables "fa sol la fa sol la mi fa" which was widely popular in England at the time. (The European "do re mi fa sol la ti do" system so familiar to us today didn't become common in the New World until the mid-1800's.)

Two singing school teachers, William Smith and William Little, published The Easy Instructor in 1801, which introduced a system of shaped note heads devised to make sight reading easier. They assigned a triangle to fa, a circle for sol, a rectangle for la, and a diamond for mi; the intervals between shapes are unchanging, enabling singers to...