Abstract:Heart sound is non-stationary signal, some of its important characteristics can be obtained by time - frequency analysis method. The criteria of different time-frequency representation concentricity of spectrogram, coverage, MSE and regularity of time envelope axe proposed, the performances of Short-time Fourier transform, Wigner - Ville distribution, continuous wavelet transform, and S transform in study on heart sound are compared based on these criteria , and concrete example of application is given.