| 1. | Music.
|
| 2. | a pipe-organ stop whose pipes give tones an octave above the normal pitch of the keys used. |
| 3. | a series or group of eight. |
| 4. | Also called octet. Prosody.
|
| 5. | the eighth of a series. |
| 6. | Ecclesiastical.
|
| 7. | one eighth of a pipe of wine. |
| 8. | Fencing. the eighth of eight defensive positions. |
| 9. | pitched an octave higher. |

An interval between musical notes in which the higher note is six whole tones, or twelve half tones, above the lower. From the standpoint of physics, the higher note has twice the frequency of the lower. Notes that are an octave apart, or a whole number of octaves apart, sound in some ways like the same note and have the same letter for their names.
Octave language
A high-level interactive language by John W. Eaton, with help from many others, like MATLAB, primarily intended for numerical computations. Octave provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically.
Octave can do arithmetic for real and complex scalars and matrices, solve sets of nonlinear algebraic equations, integrate functions over finite and infinite intervals, and integrate systems of ordinary differential and differential-algebraic equations.
Octave has been compiled and tested with g++ and libg++ on a SPARCstation 2 running SunOS 4.1.2, an IBM RS/6000 running AIX 3.2.5, DEC Alpha systems running OSF/1 1.3 and 3.0, a DECstation 5000/240 running Ultrix 4.2a, and Intel 486 systems running Linux. It should work on most other Unix systems with g++ and libg++.
Octave is distributed under the GNU General Public License. It requires gnuplot, a C++ compiler and Fortran compiler or f2c translator.
Latest version: 2.0.16 (released 2000-01-30), as of 2000-06-26.
home.
(ftp://ftp.che.wisc.edu/pub/octave/) or your nearest GNU archive site.
E-mail:
(2000-06-27)
octave
in music, an interval whose higher note has a sound-wave frequency of vibration twice that of its lower note. Thus the international standard pitch A above middle C vibrates at 440 hertz (cycles per second); the octave above this A vibrates at 880 hertz, while the octave below it vibrates at 220 hertz.
Learn more about octave with a free trial on Britannica.com.