A440. Here’s what we’re talking about. What it means is when I play this note, this string vibrates at 440 times a second.
An octave up, 880. An octave down, 220. On 10, 55, 27.5.
That’s probably lower than the speaker on your phone can play, so what you’re hearing is the upper harmonics. The string isn’t just vibrating like this. At the same time it’s doing this.
What you’re probably hearing is an octave above the fundamental, as well as a bunch of other pitches. 27.5 times a second, 55, 110, 220, 440, 880, 1760, 3520 times a second. Human hearing tops out at about 20,000 times a second.
That’s really just a couple more octaves. Speed this up by two octaves, you’d have… To capture those frequencies, we need to take a picture of the string on both sides of its travel, which means we need a sample rate of double its frequency.
Sample rates of 44.1 and 48 both get you about 20,000 cycles per second. In other words, around three octaves north of here, your sample rate of 44.1 gives you about this note. 48k gives you around this one.
96k, another octave north of that. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself talking about octaves in our classes, because you can’t take the music out of music production. If someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class, share this post.
