The mel scale, proposed by Stevens, Volkman and Newman in 1937 (J. Acoust. Soc. Am 8(3) 185--190) is a perceptual scale of pitches judged by listeners to be equal in distance from one another. The reference point between this scale and normal frequency measurement is defined by equating a 1000 Hz tone, 40 dB above the listener's threshold, with a pitch of 1000 mels. Above about 500 Hz, larger and larger intervals are judged by listeners to produce equal pitch increments. As a result, four octaves on the hertz scale above 500 Hz are judged to comprise about two octaves on the mel scale. The name mel comes from the word melody to indicate that the scale is based on pitch comparisons. Stanley Smith Stevens (1906-1973) was an American psychologist best known as the founder of Harvards Psycho-Acoustical Laboratory and credited with the introduction of Stevens power law. ... John E. Volkman (1905 - 1980) was an American industrial scientist, spent his career at RCA, designing studios and auditoria, and sound reinforcement components. ... Edwin Newman (born January 25, 1919) is a journalist and writer. ... Year 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... JASA is a scientific journal in the field of acoustics. ... In music, a scale is a set of musical notes that provides material for part or all of a musical work. ... Pitch is the perceived fundamental frequency of a sound. ... For other uses, see Frequency (disambiguation). ... This article is about the SI unit of frequency. ... For other uses, see Decibel (disambiguation). ... In music theory, the term interval describes the difference in pitch between two notes. ... For other uses, see Octave (disambiguation). ...

Many musicians and psychologists prefer a two-dimensional representation of pitch by tone color (or chroma) and tone-height, or a three-dimensional one such as the helical structure advocated by Roger Shepard, as more representative of other properties of musical hearing. To convert f hertz into m mel use: “Instrumentalist” redirects here. ... A psychologist is an expert in psychology, the systematic investigation of the human mind, including behavior, cognition, and affect. ... In music, timbre is the quality of a musical note which distinguishes different types of musical instrument. ... This article is about the shape. ... Roger Newland Shepard (born January 30, 1929 in Palo Alto, California) is a cognitive scientist and author of Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science. ...

And the inverse:

Mel Hz plot. ...

External links

• Mel <-> Hz conversion
• J. Acoust. Soc. Am. table of contents

See also

• Bark scale
• Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients