A Replication of the Mel Scale of Pitch
Robert James Siegel · The American Journal of Psychology · 1965
Stevens, Volkmann, and Newman derived a scale measuring the subjective pitch of tones by the method of bisection.' They called the subjective unit of pitch, the mel and arbitrarily assigned a value of 1000 mels to the pitch of a 1000 tone. According to their investigation, a given frequency-interval (on the logarithmic scale of music) would appear smaller in size at the upper and lower ends of the frequency-scale than in the central region; this tendency being more marked in the lower than in the upper region.