![]() ![]() It deals with notes, intervals, scales, keys, chords and other distinctly musical terms.įirst: Octave literally means a series of Eight, from the Latin octo - eight. The musical lexicon does not deal with frequencies. What exactly is an octave? Is it a range of frequencies?Īn octave is not a range of frequencies. In that case, we were using 'octave' in the sense of an interval, but sometimes the word is used in the sense of a range of notes that cover the interval of an octave: If we take a look at this table of musical notes, and look at any two adjacent C notes, we can see that they do have this 'doubling in frequency' relationship: This is why, in our system for naming notes, notes an octave apart are given the same letter name - because they have this sense of similarity to them. ![]() so the two notes are stimulating similar bits of our inner ear. ) would be a subset of those found in a note an octave lower (250, 500, 750, 1000, 1250, 1500. In a way, this is unsurprising, as the harmonics that would typically be found in a musical note at, say, 500 Hz (500, 1000, 1500. Why is this factor of 2 so special? The reason is octave equivalence - the way that most people hear something very similar between two notes that are a factor of 2 in frequency apart. If we wanted to go down an octave, we'd halve it, taking us to 50Hz. if we started with our 100Hz note again, and we wanted to go up an octave, we would double the frequency, taking us to 200Hz. An octave is simply an interval created by the use of the factor 2 instead - e.g. In our example there, we used a multiplication of 1.5. In general, we can say most people have a strong sense of relative pitch, based on the log of the frequency scale. So if we take a note at 100 Hz, and multiply that frequency by 1.5 to give us another note at 150 Hz, the perceived interval (difference in pitch) would be the same as the interval between 500Hz and 750Hz (750 being 500 x 1.5). For example, perhaps going up each semitone on the piano might mean an increase of a certain number of Hz each time?Īctually, the relationship between pitch and frequency is that each time we multiply the frequency by a certain factor, we end up subjectively increasing the pitch by the same amount. ![]() You would think that the two would be very closely-related. Frequency refers to the measurable number of cycles per second (Hz) in the sound wave, while 'pitch' refers to (subjectively) how low or high the note sounds to us. There are two words that we use to describe how 'high' (or 'low') a musical note is in absolute terms - frequency and pitch. ![]()
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