To hear a trillion vibrations of the note Middle C, you’ll have to listen for about 121 years.

If this recording produced a pure tone (which it doesn’t) you would hear 5,220 cycles of middle c vibrations over the 20 second clip. Just that much is hard to listen to. Imagine 44 days of continuous listening to hear a billion vibrations.

20 seconds of Middle C

To hear one billion vibrations you would have to listen to Middle C day and night for more than 44 days.

A million vibrations of Middle C

When you listen to the musical note Middle C, waves of vibrating air hit your eardrums 261 times each second.

To hear one million vibrations of the sound waves of Middle C, you would have to listen continuously for over an hour.

Easy time converter:

On your calculator:

     1,000,000            a million beats

    ÷      261.623      beats per second

----------------------

=   3822.29391146803    seconds required to hear a million beats

÷ 60   seconds per minute

=  63.7048985244672    minutes

Which is one hour plus 3.70 minutes (rounded)

To find out how many seconds the .7 equals,

multiply :

60        seconds per minute

x .7

-------

42      seconds

So the total time for 1 million vibrations is

63 minutes and 42 seconds.