Every culture has cultural traditions centered around music. Each cultural group has worked to answer for themselves the question of what music is, such as the rhythm, beat, tone of the sound, and how to write what they hear down on paper. The earliest known forms of written music date to 1400 BCE in what is today Iraq. One form of notation which developed was called solfège. This system was developed by Guido of Arezzo around 1000 CE and is known as Ut (later Do), Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and Si (later Ti) and was not associated with specific tones.

The 19th Century was a time of musical experimentation around the globe when musicians were modifying previous ways of learning to read printed music. During this time period, musicians from around the globe printed manuals explaining various methods for learning to read music.

Music techniques previously recorded through oral traditions were printed in these new books to try to best capture the essence of the sounds. Some of the new systems of learning to read music included music notation in braille, hand signals which followed along with solfège, and shape-notes. A few examples of places where these new books were published were in England, Ottoman Syria, France, China, India and the United States.

In England, Sarah Anna Glover refined a centuries old way of learning music through developing a new method with Do, Re, Mi etc. She wrote Scheme for Rendering Psalmody Congregational in 1835. In Ottoman Syria, Mikhail Mishaqa learned the 24 tone scale method from his teacher Sheikh Muhammad al-‘Attār who did not publish the teaching method. Mishaqua took the techniques he learned from his teacher and published the book Essay on the Art of Music for the Emir Shihāb in 1840. In France, Pierre Galin developed a new system but before he could patent it Aimé Paris printed it in 1818 in a book called Explanation of a New Way of Teaching Music. The system they used is called the Galin-Paris-Chevé system. This system was brought to China and adapted to become the numbered musical notation system. In India, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande published Shri Mallakshaya Sangeetam in 1909 with a notation system to help people to learn Hindustani music. In the United States, around 1790 the association of four shapes, namely a triangle, oval, square, and diamond, were added to the fa, sol, la, mi system. This new system was invented by either John Connelly or Andrew Law and was published in a book called The Easy Instructor by William Little and William Smith in 1801.