# What acoustics do MFCCs correspond to?

My question is, what frequency ranges do MFCCs correspond to?

My line of thinking thus far is that if your highest frequency in the signal was 8000 Hz, you could convert to Mels (= 2834 Mels), take 13 (for 13 MFCCs) evenly spaced measurements (0, 118.12, 236.24, etc.) and then convert back to Hertz to get start and end points for where the triangular windowing functions would be. Does that mean that MFCC1 corresponds to 0 to 77.5 Hz, MFCC2 corresponds to 77.5 to 163.5 Hz (approx, I know there is some rounding here)? How could I visualize these triangular windows to see what frequency value had the most weight (since I guess the frequencies further from the middle of the triangle would be represented less)?

• No, MFCC's are coefficients that correspond to cosine fits of log-mel energies. – jojek Oct 8 '20 at 15:30
• @jojek thank you for linking me to that answer. So is my understanding correct that there is not really a way to understand the acoustics from looking at the MFCCs? – Lisa Oct 8 '20 at 15:35
• Indeed, once you get to MFCC's forget about drawing scientific conclusions (unless in some specific cases). – jojek Oct 8 '20 at 15:51