Modulation spaces: from Feichtinger's original definition to modern Gabor and symplectic characterizations
We present an expository excursus on modulation spaces, from Feichtinger's original construction on locally compact abelian groups to recent symplectic formulations. We trace the same local-global principle through bounded uniform partitions of unity, the short-time Fourier transform, coorbit methods, and Gabor coefficients, while distinguishing equivalent descriptions from the weighted, quasi-Banach, and Gelfand-Shilov extensions of the underlying functional setting. We also discuss Gabor matrices, convolution and embedding estimates, and an application to a nonlinear dispersive equation. The final part is devoted to metaplectic Wigner distributions $W_{\mathcal A}$. In the shift-invertible case these representations are, up to chirps and a linear change of phase-space variables, rescaled short-time Fourier transforms. This structural fact explains both their characterization of modulation and Wiener amalgam spaces and their discretization by metaplectic Gabor frames, and places the recent symplectic theory naturally within Feichtinger's modulation-space framework.