The unifying power of Fourier’s idea is that the sound of any musical instrument can be synthesized by an array of infinitely many tuning forks. All we need to do is strike the tuning forks with the right strengths and at the right times and, incredibly, out pops the sound of a violin or a piano or even a trumpet or an oboe, although we’re using nothing more than colorless sine waves. This is essentially how the first electronic synthesizers worked: they reproduced the sound of any instrument by combining a large number of sine waves.
