About Quilisma
Quilisma teaches you to read Gregorian chant in square notation and sing it on solfege, a few minutes a day. It’s built for parish cantors, choir members, seminarians, and anyone who wants to sing the Church’s own music at Mass.
START WHERE YOU ARE
New to chant? Begin with the four-line staff and the Do clef. Already read some music? A five-minute placement test skips what you know and picks up where you need to be.
LEARN STEP BY STEP
Thirty skills in eight units take you from your first note to sight-singing whole phrases: • The staff and the Do and Fa clefs, with movable-do solfege • Every common neume: punctum, virga, podatus, clivis, torculus, porrectus, scandicus, climacus, and more • Liquescents, the quilisma, salicus, pressus, and repeated notes • The flat, the natural, the custos, and the rhythmic signs of the Solesmes method • The eight modes, their finals and dominants • The psalm tones, from intonation and tenor to mediant and termination • Sight-reading short phrases in every mode
Each new skill opens with a short lesson and a worked example you can hear. Exercises adapt to you: get it right and they grow more challenging; struggle and they ease off until it clicks. Skills you’ve learned come back for short reviews at growing intervals, so they stick.
SEE IT, HEAR IT, WRITE IT
Read notes and neumes, hear melodies and pick what you heard, and tap the staff to write notes and build neumes yourself. Every answer comes with an explanation, the notation, and the sound.
A CHANT LIBRARY
Quilisma includes the Pater noster, the Sanctus, and the Salve Regina in square notation. Add any chant from GregoBase by pasting its GABC code. Quilisma draws it in square notation with the text, plays it with the current note highlighted, and can show the solfege under every neume.
A GENTLE DAILY HABIT
• Sessions of about five to ten minutes • A daily goal and streak, with streak freezes for days life gets in the way • Daily and weekly challenges • An optional daily reminder at a time you choose, skipped on days you’ve met your goal • A progress page with your practice calendar and how every skill is going
A REFERENCE AT HAND
Look up every clef, neume, sign and bar line, and all eight modes with their psalm tones. Tap any example to hear it.
MADE TO RESPECT YOU
• Free, with no ads and nothing locked behind a paywall • No account, no tracking: your progress stays on your device • Works fully offline • Back up and restore your progress yourself • Light and dark themes; set the pitch of “do” to suit your voice • Designed for phones and tablets
Quilisma began as a passion project while I was learning chant myself, and I’m sharing it freely. If it helps you to sing and pray, you can leave an optional donation from Settings. There’s no obligation.
A Reductio ad Deum project · reductio-ad-deum.com