Just by listening, humans can determine who is talking to them, whether a window in their house is open or shut, or what their child dropped on the floor in the next room. This ability to derive information from sound is enabled by a cascade of neuronal processing stages that transform the sound waveform entering the ear into cortical representations that are presumed to make behaviorally important sound properties explicit. Although much is known about the peripheral processing of sound, the auditory cortex is less understood, particularly in humans, with little consensus even about its coarse-scale organization. This talk will describe our recent efforts to develop and test models of auditory cortical computation, to delineate function within auditory cortex, and to understand the role of the cortex in robust sound recognition.