Megahertz to Beats Per Minute (MHz to bpm)

1 megahertz equals 60,000,000 beats per minute exactly.

How to convert megahertz to beats per minute

To convert megahertz to beats per minute, multiply the number of megahertz by 60,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply beats per minute by 1.666666667×10⁻⁸ (rounded).

beats per minute = megahertz × 60,000,000

Example: 10 megahertz = 600,000,000 beats per minute.

About these units

Megahertz (MHz)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million hertz. FM radio and older processors.

Engineers once said megacycles, and the older unit shows up in postwar papers, one 1946 study on ultrasound in liquids being titled with 15 megacycles. When hertz replaced cycles per second, the megacycle per second, Mc/s, became the megahertz. The word then entered home computing: Wikipedia notes personal computer clock speeds of around 1 MHz in the late 1970s on machines from Atari, Commodore and Apple.

A megahertz is one million hertz, the natural scale of broadcast radio. FM stations in most of the world use 87.5 to 108 MHz, with the Americas using 88 to 108 MHz and Japan using 76 to 95 MHz. In North America channels are spaced 200 kHz apart, and the FCC reassigned FM to its present band in 1945. As a way to rate computers, clock speed is criticised by many experts, who call it an easily manipulable benchmark because some chips need several cycles per operation and others perform several operations in one.

1 megahertz = 1,000,000 hertz (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Megahertz; Wikipedia: FM broadcast band

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.