Editing Time–frequency analysis (section)

===Optics, acoustics, and biomedicine===
[[Light]] is an electromagnetic wave, so time–frequency analysis applies to optics in the same way as for general electromagnetic wave propagation. 

Similarly, it is a characteristic of acoustic signals, that their frequency components undergo abrupt variations in time and would hence be not well represented by a single frequency component analysis covering their entire durations.

As acoustic signals are used as speech in communication between the human-sender and -receiver, their undelayedly transmission in technical communication systems is crucial, which makes the use of simpler TFDs, such as the Gabor transform, suitable to analyze these signals in real-time by reducing computational complexity. 

If frequency analysis speed is not a limitation, a detailed feature comparison with well defined criteria should be made before selecting a particular TFD. Another approach is to define a signal dependent TFD that is adapted to the data.
In biomedicine, one can use time–frequency distribution to analyze the [[electromyography]] (EMG), [[electroencephalography]] (EEG), [[electrocardiogram]] (ECG) or [[otoacoustic emissions]] (OAEs).