What is solfege, and what do Do-Re-Mi actually mean?
Solfege names notes with singable syllables: Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. In fixed do (Europe, Israel) Do is C; in movable do, Do is any key’s home.
Do, Re, Mi and friends are singable names for notes, the ones from The Sound of Music. They exist because "C, D, E" is awkward to sing.
In much of the world (France, Italy, Spain, Israel and more) these ARE the note names: Do is C, Re is D, La is A, Si is B. This site’s name, Tavi La Si, plays on exactly that system.
Two systems share the syllables. Fixed do welds each syllable to a pitch: Do is always C, Si always B, whatever the key. Movable do welds syllables to scale degrees: Do is the tonic of the current key, so the syllables encode function rather than absolute pitch.
The seventh syllable splits by tradition: European fixed do says Si; the English tonic sol-fa tradition renamed it Ti so every syllable starts with a unique letter (and altered degrees get syllables like Di and Ra).
Both systems train ears well: movable do maps beautifully onto relative pitch and scale-degree hearing; fixed do doubles as note-naming fluency where it is the native nomenclature.
History: the syllables come from an 11th-century hymn whose phrases each began one step higher (Ut queant laxis); Ut became Do, and Si was added later for the seventh degree. Sarah Glover and John Curwen’s 19th-century English reform produced Ti and the movable system used in Kodály teaching.
The deep pedagogical divide: movable do trains the relative, functional ear (Do-Mi-Sol means tonic-third-fifth in any key), while fixed do trains absolute note identity, matching how Romance-language musicians read. Neither is "correct"; they optimize different reflexes.
Tavi La Si sits comfortably in the fixed-do world of its Israeli and European users (La = A, Si = B) while training the movable-do SKILL: hearing every note’s role relative to home.