Octave vs Decibel

[taselby]

This is a repost for unlocking purposes.

This is another one that I run across quite a bit: the interchangeability of "octave" and "decibel" in reference to sound, as though the two are equivalent or synonymous. Let's take a moment and do a couple of quick searches.

An "octave" is a specific measurement of relative pitch or frequency of two

Comments

[mzcalypso]

For non-math people:

Octave is the note, decibel is how loud.

People interchange these? Really?

[taselby]

People really do. More in the direction of using "octave" instead of "decibel" (and not knowing how many decibels of noise they are dealing with) than the reverse.

It baffles me, because it's nothing a quick trip to Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or a friendly science geek wouldn't fix.

[klia]

It baffles me, because it's nothing a quick trip to Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, or a friendly science geek wouldn't fix.

That baffles me on a daily basis. It's SO freaking easy to Google anything and everything, but so few people seem to bother. To me, that's fandom V2.0 all over: it's all about feedback, so quality/accuracy be damned.