Researchers have been looking for ways to decompose sound into its basic ingredients for more than 200 years. In the 1820s, French scientist Joseph Fourier proposed that any signal, including sounds, can be built using a sufficient number of sine waves. These waves sound like whistles, each have their own frequency, level and start time, and are the basic building blocks of sound.
Click here for original story, Acoustics researchers decompose sound accurately into its three basic components
Source: Phys.org