Music & Acoustics
Advanced

Mel Scale (Pitch Perception)

Converts frequency to the perceptual mel pitch scale.

Formula

m=2595log⁡10 ⁣(1+f700)m = 2595 \log_{10}\!\left(1 + \frac{f}{700}\right)

Variables

mPitch (mels)
fFrequency (Hz)

Example

f=1000 Hz: m = 2595 log(2.43) ≈ 1000 mels

Did You Know?

The mel scale underpins MFCC features that power speech recognition and music-genre classifiers.

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