text: Function As with other primary sensory cortical areas, auditory sensations reach perception only if received and processed by a cortical area. Evidence for this comes from lesion studies in human patients who have sustained damage to cortical areas through tumors or strokes, or from animal experiments in which cortical areas were deactivated by surgical lesions or other methods. Damage to the auditory cortex in humans leads to a loss of any awareness of sound, but an ability to react reflexively to sounds remains as there is a great deal of subcortical processing in the auditory brainstem and midbrain.
  Neurons in the auditory cortex are organized according to the frequency of sound to which they respond best. Neurons at one end of the auditory cortex respond best to low frequencies; neurons at the other respond best to high frequencies. There are multiple auditory areas (much like the multiple areas in the visual cortex), which can be distinguished anatomically and on the basis that they contain a complete "frequency map." The purpose of this frequency map (known as a tonotopic map) likely reflects the fact that the cochlea is arranged according to sound frequency. The auditory cortex is involved in tasks such as identifying and segregating "auditory  objects" and identifying the location of a sound in space. For example, it has been shown that A1 encodes complex and abstract aspects of auditory stimuli without encoding their "raw" aspects like frequency content, presence of a distinct sound or its echoes.
  Human brain scans indicated that a peripheral part of this brain region is active when trying to identify musical pitch. Individual cells consistently get excited by sounds at specific frequencies, or multiples of that frequency.