A brute force calculation of a length N DFT requires a number of operations

roughly proportional to N2. Thus, a 1024-point DFT would require about a million
multiplications and about a million additions.

 Luckily, the DFT algorithm can be simplified to a form in which the required number of

calculations is proportional to Now, our 1024-point DFT can be calculated

with only about 10,000 operations!
 This simplified algorithm is referred to as the Fast Fourier Transform or FFT.

Time / Frequency Resolution

 As mentioned above, a length N FFT (or DFT) computes sinusoidal ``weights'' for N
evenly spaced frequencies between 0 and fs (N-1)/N. From the sampling theorem, only the
first half of these frequency weights are unique.
 It follows that the larger the value of N, the more sinusoidal weights are computed and
the smaller the spacing between frequency components. This spacing is given by fs/N.
 If analyzing a fairly static sound signal, you would thus be best off using a larger value of
N to get a more precise estimate of the frequency content.
 On the other hand, if the timbre of a sound changes significantly over time, you will need
to segment the sound and compute separate FFTs over each block, in order to estimate
the change of the frequency content from one block to another. This may require smaller
values of N, in order to isolate changes over time.
 When computing FFTs over time (blocks), the resulting data can be displayed in terms of
a waterfall plot (separate spectra slightly offset from one another) or as a spectrogram (a
2D time vs. frequency plot where spectral magnitudes are displayed using color maps).

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