As with all Bell Labs projects, the DTMF spec was carefully crafted. The audio tones for the low-group and high-group were carefully chosen to avoid harmonics that might interfere with decoding ...
[Brad] over at LucidScience decided that it would be useful to have a DTMF decoder on hand, and got busy building one. His DTMF decoder box uses a CM8870 DTMF decoder chip, which you might assume ...