OK. I admit this is idle curiosity. Forever, it seems, I have wondered what the waveform of real, complex music and sound look like when plotted. We are all familiar ad nauseum with the sine wave plots used to illustrate the workings of audio components. Music, even from a single instrument, has harmonics and such. Imagine the sound coming from a band or orchestra in all its simultaneous complexity.

My gut feeling is that when this information is reproduced we get a single frequency at any given point in time. It is certainly not a smooth sine wave, but what would a plot of it actually look like over an interval of time? Perhaps it can not be plotted as a wave, but rather graphically represented with one of the other audio representations, like a waterfall plot or something. Good guess, I am not an audio engineer.

I have never seen this represented or vividly described anywhere. I am sure it has been, but I have not seen it myself. Otherwise I would not be wondering about this.

Clark