Comment by cbondurant

This feels like a very indirect way of saying "yes the fourier transform of a signal is a breakdown of its component frequencies, but depending on the kind of signal you are trying to characterize for it might not be what you actually need."

Its not that unintuitive to imagine that if all of your signals are pulses, something like the wavelet transform might do a better job at giving you meaningful insights into a signal than the fourier transform might.