Octave Sound Samples

I’ve not had much real musical training, but enough to know that I have a terrible ear for sound and can’t reproduce a note for anything. However, an informed source tells me that octaves represent the same note at different pitches.

The pitch is the frequency of the sound wave.

This "note" is a sound wave with a frequency (pitch) of 347 cycles per second (347 Hz), which has a wavelength of approximately 1 meter. It sounds like this.

If one note has twice the frequency of the other, they’re said to be one octave apart. For example, click on the image below to listen to the same note at different octaves:

Click the waves to hear the different octaves. The wavelengths of the sounds are shown (in meters).

Or play the files:

Wavelength Frequency Sound File (mp3)
1 m 347 Hz 1m.mpg
0.5 m 694 Hz 50cm.mp3
0.25 m 1388 Hz 25cm.mp3

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