Too fascinating not to share: Jon-Kyle, who appears from his website to be a designer and musician, has used the software refreq to do a real-time map of all the frequencies that go into a song in a circle around a vertical axis.
Musical spectrum analysis from Jon-Kyle on Vimeo.
As a crappy amateur musician myself, I think it would be fascinating to explore how you can craft and characterize sounds from their innate waveshapes. I know there are tools out there that let you begin to do this, but it would take some serious brain time to even begin to understand them.
Thanks to Flowing Data for calling my attention to this.