Mel to Hertz Converter

About this calculator

The mel scale is a perceptual pitch scale built so that equal distances in mel correspond to equal distances in perceived pitch, unlike hertz which is linear in physical frequency but not in how the ear hears it. The most common formula, from Douglas O'Shaughnessy, is f = 700·(10^(m/2595) − 1), which maps 1000 Hz to 1000 mel and compresses higher frequencies the way the human cochlea does.

Speech and audio engineers rely on mel-to-Hz conversion to build Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs), the standard front-end features for speech recognition, speaker identification and music information retrieval, as well as to design mel-spectrogram inputs for machine learning models.