Disturbances that propagate throughout a plant can have an impact on product quality and running costs. There is thus a motivation for the automated detection of plant-wide disturbances and for the isolation of the sources. A new application of independent component analysis (ICA), multi-resolution spectral ICA, is proposed to detect and isolate the sources of multiple oscillations in a chemical process. Its key feature is that it extracts dominant spectrum-like independent components each of which has a narrow-band peak that captures the behaviour of one of the oscillation sources. Additionally, a significance index is presented that links the sources to specific plant measurements in order to facilitate the isolation of the sources of the oscillations. A case study is presented that demonstrates the ability of spectral ICA to detect and isolate multiple dominant oscillations in different frequency ranges in a large data set from an industrial chemical process. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.