  A major issue in harmonic analysis is to capture the phase dependence of
frequency representations, which carries important signal properties. It seems
that convolutional neural networks have found a way. Over time-series and
images, convolutional networks often learn a first layer of filters which are
well localized in the frequency domain, with different phases. We show that a
rectifier then acts as a filter on the phase of the resulting coefficients. It
computes signal descriptors which are local in space, frequency and phase. The
non-linear phase filter becomes a multiplicative operator over phase harmonics
computed with a Fourier transform along the phase. We prove that it defines a
bi-Lipschitz and invertible representation. The correlations of phase harmonics
coefficients characterise coherent structures from their phase dependence
across frequencies. For wavelet filters, we show numerically that signals
having sparse wavelet coefficients can be recovered from few phase harmonic
correlations, which provide a compressive representation
