Beat Per Minute (bpm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

1 beat per minute = 0.01666666667 hertz (approximately).

About the beat per minute

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.

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

Beat Per Minute conversion chart

1 beat per minute expressed in every other frequency unit:

More Metric (SI) units

• hertz (frequency)
• kilohertz (frequency)
• megahertz (frequency)
• gigahertz (frequency)
• terahertz (frequency)
• millihertz (frequency)
• revolution per minute (frequency)
• meter (length)
• kilometer (length)
• centimeter (length)
• millimeter (length)
• micrometer (length)
• nanometer (length)
• picometer (length)
• decimeter (length)
• hectometer (length)

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