The auditory sense of humans transforms intrinsically senseless pressure waveforms into spectacularly rich perceptual phenomena: the music of Bach or the Beatles, the poetry of Li Bai or Omar Khayyam, or more prosaically the sense of the world filled with objects emitting sounds that is so important for those of us lucky enough to have hearing. Whereas the early representations of sounds in the auditory system are based on their physical structure, higher auditory centers are thought to represent sounds in terms of their perceptual attributes. In this symposium, we will illustrate the current research into this process, using four case studies. We will illustrate how the spectral and temporal properties of sounds are used to bind together, segregate, categorize, and interpret sound patterns on their way to acquire meaning, with important lessons to other sensory systems as well.The auditory system extracts an astounding amount of information about the world from seemingly simple signals Ϫ sound waves reaching the two ears. The initial sound representations, at the auditory nerve that connects the inner ear with the CNS, as well as in brainstem stations, such as the cochlear nucleus and the superior olivary complex, are well described. Indeed, the cochlear nucleus can compete with the retina for being the best understood CNS structure, and technological standards, such as the MP3 sound coding scheme, are based in part on the deep understanding that already exists regarding these initial sound representations in the early stages of the auditory system.There is, however, a large gap between these early representations, which are centered on the physical structure of the sound waveform, and perceptual representations, which are related to the actual "things" that occur in the world. Following the groundbreaking work of Bregman and his collaborators (Bregman, 1990