Auditory representations for long lasting sounds: Insights from event-related brain potentials and neural oscillations

The basic features of short sounds, such as frequency and intensity including their temporal dynamics, are in-tegrated in a unitary representation. Knowledge on how our brain processes long lasting sounds is scarce. We review research utilizing the Mismatch Negativity event-related potential and neural oscillatory activity for studying representations for long lasting simple versus complex sounds such as sinusoidal tones versus speech. There is evidence for a temporal constraint in the formation of auditory representations: Auditory edges like sound onsets within long lasting sounds open a temporal window of about 350 ms in which the sounds' dynamics are integrated into a representation, while information beyond that window contributes less to that represen-tation. This integration window segments the auditory input into short chunks. We argue that the representations established in adjacent integration windows can be concatenated into an auditory representation of a long sound, thus, overcoming the temporal constraint.