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).
One of my physics students is working on a project to demonstrate interference in sound waves, so I generated a few sound files with different wavelengths for her to experiment with.
A sound wave with a frequency of 347 cycles per second (347 Hz), which has a wavelength of approximately 1 meter. Waveform captured using the WaveWindow program.
Using SoX, you can generate waves by inputing the frequency you want (using the synth command). The frequency () depends on the wavelength () and speed () of the sound waves through air.
The speed of sound through the air depends on the temperature (it’s a linear relationship). Hyperphysics has a nice Speed of Sound in Air calculator, which tells me that at room temperature (about 25 ºC):
) depends on the wavelength (
) and speed (
) of the sound waves through air.
