Tempo is one of the most influential cues to emotion in speech and music. Yet, there is a wealth of evidence that the perception of tempo, itself, can be influenced by other acoustic and contextual features of the speech or music in question. For example, people tend to perceive or remember speech and music as faster when it is presented in a higher register than when it is presented in a lower register. It has therefore been suggested that pitch height influences perceived tempo. However, previous studies have typically compared only one lower register with one higher register. Given that factors such as cochlear sensitivity and pitch saliency are also known to vary between octaves, it cannot be conclusively argued that pitch height is the driving factor behind this illusory tempo effect. To distinguish pitch height—which changes linearly across octaves—from factors such as cochlear sensitivity and pitch saliency—which vary nonlinearly across octaves—it is necessary to compare perceived tempo across several levels of pitch that span the range of human hearing. To address this issue, we asked participants to compare the tempo of various repeating piano tones to a metronomic standard. The tones spanned six octaves and a wide range of interonset intervals. Results showed that perceived tempo changed nonlinearly across octaves, with middle octaves rated as faster than extremely low and extremely high octaves. These findings challenge the notion that pitch height drives the illusory percepts of time noted in prior studies, and suggest that this effect may instead be driven by a factor which varies nonlinearly across octaves.