The sound of silence: Recovering signals from time-frequency zeros

Disentangling multicomponent nonstationary signals into coherent AM-FM modes is usually achieved by identifying “loud” time-frequency trajectories where energy is locally maximum. We will present here an alternative perspective that is based on “silent” points, namely spectrogram zeros. The rationale and the implementation of the approach will be discussed, as well as an application to the characterization of an actual gravitational wave chirp embedded in noise.