Plus, in Portuguese, the pitch ‘Ti’ (‘B’) can also be called ‘Si’. These countries also sometimes call a C sharp ‘Cis’ or ‘Ciss’, which literally means ‘C sharp’. There are a few possible reasons for this: the ‘H’ might stand for ‘hart’ (German for ‘hard’) or, it could have just been a mistake in early sheet music, owing to the fact that the B flat symbol ( ♭) looks a bit like a ‘b’, and the sharp symbol ( ♯) looks a bit like an ‘H’. In Germany, Scandinavia and Slavic countries, the note ‘B’ (or ‘Ti’) is called ‘H’, while ‘B flat’ is called ‘B’.

Via GIPHY Simple, right? But wait, there’s more… The slight snag here is that Do-Re-Mi is based on the pitches of a C major scale, because with no accidentals, it’s the simplest example of a major scale. This is known as Boethian notation, because a sixth-century philosopher called Boethius had the idea to use letters of the classical Latin alphabet to represent musical notes.

B flat major symbol