Hertz to Beats Per Minute (Hz to bpm)

1 hertz equals 60 beats per minute exactly.

How to convert hertz to beats per minute

To convert hertz to beats per minute, multiply the number of hertz by 60. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply beats per minute by 0.01666666667 (rounded).

beats per minute = hertz × 60

Example: 10 hertz = 600 beats per minute.

About these units

Hertz (Hz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of frequency: one cycle per second. Named after Heinrich Hertz.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857 to 1894) was a German physicist who, in experiments between 1886 and 1889, produced and detected radio waves with a spark-gap transmitter and a loop receiver. He showed that they travel at the speed of light and can be polarised, reflected and refracted, confirming Maxwell's theory. Asked about uses for them, he is said to have replied, Nothing, I guess. The International Electrotechnical Commission established the name hertz in 1935, and the CGPM adopted it in 1960, replacing cycles per second.

One hertz is one cycle per second, equal to s to the minus one. A clock ticking once a second runs at 1 Hz, a human heart at rest beats at around 1.2 Hz, and young ears hear roughly 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. The SI treats cycle itself as not a unit, and the hertz applies only to periodic events, whereas the becquerel counts random radioactive decays, even though both are one per second. The second is now defined by fixing the caesium frequency at exactly 9,192,631,770 hertz.

The hertz is the reference unit for frequency on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Hertz; Wikipedia: Heinrich Hertz; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition

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

Related conversions

See all frequency units.