page_title: Twelfth root of two
section_title: Pitch adjustment
hierarchical_section_title: Twelfth root of two / Pitch adjustment
caption_attribution_description: English: Equal tempered scale on a monochord. Each step is the twelfth root of two (12&#8730;2 = 2 1 / 12 {\displaystyle =2^{1/12}} ).
context_page_description: The twelfth root of two or is an algebraic irrational number. It is most important in Western music theory, where it represents the frequency ratio of a semitone in twelve-tone equal temperament. This number was proposed for the first time in relationship to musical tuning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It allows measurement and comparison of different intervals as consisting of different numbers of a single interval, the equal tempered semitone. A semitone itself is divided into 100 cents.
context_section_description: Since the frequency ratio of a semitone is close to 106% (), increasing or decreasing the playback speed of a recording by 6% will shift the pitch up or down by about one semitone, or "half-step". Upscale reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders typically have pitch adjustments of up to ±6%, generally used to match the playback or recording pitch to other music sources having slightly different tunings (or possibly recorded on equipment that was not running at quite the right speed). Modern recording studios utilize digital pitch shifting to achieve similar results, ranging from cents up to several half-steps (note that reel-to-reel adjustments also affect the tempo of the recorded sound, while digital shifting does not).
  DJ turntables can have an adjustment up to ±20%, but this is more often used for beat synchronization between songs than for pitch adjustment, which is mostly useful only in transitions between beatless and ambient parts. For beatmatching music of high melodic content the DJ would primarily try to look for songs that sound harmonic together when set to equal tempo.
caption: One octave of 12-tet on a monochord (linear)
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