19 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Signal Proc.This paper investigates how Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), a fully data-driven technique recently introduced for decomposing any oscillatory waveform into zero-mean components, behaves in the case of a composite two-tones signal. Essentially two regimes are shown to exist, depending on whether the amplitude ratio of the tones is greater or smaller than unity, and the corresponding resolution properties of EMD turn out to be in good agreement with intuition and physical interpretation. A refined analysis is provided for quantifying the observed behaviours, theoretical claims are supported by numerical experiments, and possible extensions to nonlinear oscillations are briefly outlined
