Temporal processing in primate auditory cortex

A cornerstone of the human auditory system is its ability to recognize and appreciate music and speech. At its most basic level, music is made up of melodies and rhythms, which are the relative changes in pitch and temporal rates, respectively, for a series of musical notes. Speech is also composed of sequences of different pitches and temporal rates, however pitch changes carry prosody information (for non-tonal languages), while semantic information in contained in the temporal rate. How is an acoustic signal''s temporal rate and pitch encoded in the auditory system? For my dissertation, I have investigated the neural coding of a sound''s temporal properties by single neurons in the auditory cortex of the marmoset.