According to what reported by its inventor, there had been some previous attempts to faithfully transcribe the tones of acting. Some attempts had been carried out by the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres of Paris. Its perpetual secretary Charles Pinot Duclos wrote that abbot Jean-Baptiste Dubos proposed to create a group of experts in the field of music, in order to identify and distinguish fractions of the human voice's diatonic scale.