How did they record tunes in ancient times when they didn't have five-stringed music?

We should all be very curious about how the ancient songs were passed down to this day, and they didn't have five-stringed scores to record the tunes, but we all know their tunes at that time now,so they all had specific methods and scores to record at that time, there are mainly the following kinds.

One, by word of mouth. At that time, Qin Shi Huang's "book with the same text" effectively preserved written works, but sound works were not so lucky, the earliest only through oral transmission. Oral tradition has a big disadvantage, it is easy to be misled. Nowadays, many ancient songs are fake, so people have been trying to restore them. In addition, musical works are passed down through the population, and time is the greatest enemy. If the music has little influence, it may not circulate for a long time. Without the wide spread of singing, one of the top ten ancient musical compositions, "High Mountains and Flowing Water" would have been lost long ago.

Two, the written score. The written score was the earliest music score at that time. In order to allow future generations to "repeat old tunes", some people began to record the specific performance of music in written form. The earliest surviving sheet music in China, Jieshi yulan, uses 4,954 Chinese characters to record in detail the strings, positions, and playing techniques of each sound on the guqin. It is because of this ancient sheet music that this 1500-year-old tune was played. The wisdom of the ancients is infinite.

Three, the minuscule score. This is the most important notation tool in China, Cao Rou invented the "minuscule score" in the Tang Dynasty. It is a composite character that puts all kinds of hieroglyphic strokes into a single character and divides it into upper and lower parts. The upper part represents the left hand fingering and the position of the emblem, while the lower part represents the chord number and the right hand fingering. During the Late Tang Dynasty, Chen Kangshi and Chen Zhuo compiled a large number of musical scores based on the simplified scores and passed them down. Traditional Chinese music has survived to the present day mainly because of the "simple score", which is arguably the most important musical notation tool in China.

The most widely used method of singing music in ancient times was the Working Ruler Sheet, and it must be said that the wisdom of our ancient people was really infinite, and they preserved the good works in the way they could think of at that time, which provided a valuable treasure for the future generations.