Pitch Shift Calculator

Pitch shift here follows equal-temperament tuning: each semitone changes frequency by a factor of 2^(1/12), so shifting by n semitones multiplies the original frequency by 2^(n/12) — the same ratio a piano's black-and-white key spacing is built on, and the reason 12 semitones exactly doubles frequency (one octave). Cents, the finer-grained tuning unit, fall out directly as 100 × semitones. The calculator's real value is separating two different real-world scenarios that both get called "pitch shifting." Toggle "Link Pitch and Tempo" on and you get the vinyl/tape-speed-change behavior: speeding up the physical playback raises pitch and tempo together by the same ratio, so the new BPM is simply the original BPM times the frequency ratio.

Leave it off and tempo holds steady — the calculator instead reports the time-stretch ratio (1 / frequency ratio) needed to shift pitch independently of tempo, which is what modern DAW pitch-shift/time-stretch algorithms do computationally rather than by literally changing playback speed. One thing to watch: the time-stretch and duration-change percentages are always calculated from the frequency ratio regardless of which link mode you've selected, so read them as "what duration change independent time-stretching would require," not as a description of what happens to the track when linked mode is engaged — in linked mode duration changes by the inverse of the frequency ratio for a different reason (faster playback simply takes less time), not because of a time-stretch algorithm.