Beats Per Minute to Kilohertz (bpm to kHz)

1 beat per minute equals 0.00001666666667 kilohertz (rounded).

1 beat per minute = 0.00001666666667 kilohertz

How to convert beats per minute to kilohertz

To convert beats per minute to kilohertz, multiply the number of beats per minute by 0.00001666666667. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply kilohertz by 60,000.

kilohertz = beats per minute × 0.00001666666667

Example: 10 beats per minute = 0.0001666666667 kilohertz.

About these units

Beat Per Minute (bpm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One 60th of a hertz. Used for heart rate and music tempo.

Musicians counted beats long before they could count them by the minute. In the Renaissance, performers followed the tactus, a pulse roughly the speed of a heartbeat, and Italian words such as Allegro and Andante took over in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dietrich Winkel built a mechanical metronome in 1814, and Johann Maelzel added a numerical scale and began producing it in 1816. Beethoven was the first notable composer to write metronome markings into his music, doing so in December 1815.

Beats per minute, one sixtieth of a hertz, is now the language of both the concert hall and the clinic. Mechanical metronomes typically cover 40 to 208 bpm, and rough guides place Largo at 40 to 66 and Presto at 168 to 200. For hearts, the American Heart Association gives 60 to 100 bpm as a normal adult resting rate, though a source cited on Wikipedia argues that 50 to 90 fits the evidence better. Trained endurance athletes often sit lower, and the slowest healthy rate on record is listed as 26 bpm, set in 2014.

1 beat per minute = 0.01666666667 hertz (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Metronome; Wikipedia: Tempo; Wikipedia: Heart rate

Kilohertz (kHz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 hertz. AM radio stations are tuned in kilohertz and audio is sampled at 44.1 kHz.

Older radio operators called it the kilocycle. Before the CGPM adopted the hertz in 1960, thousands of cycles per second were written kc/s, and the popular press only switched to kilohertz in the late 1960s. The name changed, but the number on the dial did not.

A kilohertz is 1,000 hertz, a range that covers audible sound and medium-wave radio. Medium wave runs from 531 to 1602 kHz in Europe, Asia and Africa with 9 kHz channel spacing, and from 530 to 1700 kHz in the Americas with 10 kHz spacing. Audio engineers use it for sampling rates: 44.1 kHz comes from the Compact Disc, which Sony used from 1979, and the rate was originally chosen so digital audio could fit on video tape for both PAL and NTSC. Because sampling must exceed twice the highest frequency, 44.1 kHz comfortably covers hearing up to 20 kHz.

1 kilohertz = 1,000 hertz (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Medium wave; Wikipedia: 44,100 Hz; Wikipedia: Kilohertz

Related conversions

See all frequency units.