Synaptic zinc is a novel modulator of cortical sound processing - a modulator that increases the gain of principal neurons, but reduces the gain of interneurons.

Deactivation of one side of the auditory midbrain while recording in the other shows that the two sides cooperate in processing frequency and in enhancing the encoding of sound level.

The location of impact sounds, common stimuli whose detection is crucial for survival, is encoded by a precise interaction between excitation and inhibition rather than coincidence detection of excitatory events.

Targeted recordings from subcortical projection neurons in the auditory cortex reveal two cell classes with distinct signatures of sensory processing and different patterns of local and long-range connectivity.

Feedback from the mammalian auditory cortex to the midbrain decreases sound selectivity, altering how sounds are processed in the brain.

Robust and wide-spread locomotion-related neural signals, revealed in the mouse auditory midbrain, suggest that integrating movement-related information is an essential aspect of midbrain sound processing.

Auditory representations of natural sounds are similar in primary auditory cortex of ferrets and humans, but diverge sharply in non-primary areas for speech and music sounds.

Syntactic structure-building processes can be applied to speech that is task-irrelevant and should be ignored, demonstrating that Selective Attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of competing speech.

fMRI data from macaques suggest that sounds with similar temporal characteristics activate neighbouring regions of auditory cortex, giving rise to a topographic map broadly analogous to that for sound frequencies.

Volume electron-microscopic reconstructions of auditory brainstem neurons and their afferent synapses were used to develop a pipeline creating biophysically defined computational models with heterogenous inputs, revealing roles for subthreshold synapses to enhance temporal processing unique features of their dendrites.