All of us here love music. We’re obsessed with working out what’s critical in making musical experiences magical and believable. We work a lot with frequency-time (and even better, frequency-phase-time) plots to understand the harmonic content of music, and how the sound from a hi-fi system differs from the live performance.

These can look quite beautiful in themselves—you can see the beat and the chords. After a while looking at them you start to recognise the harmonic patterns of different instruments.

It’s amazing how sensitive the ear is to some very subtle changes, and yet how other changes are completely inaudible.