Temporary and longer term retention of acoustic information

Though many studies suggest that fine acoustic details fade from memory after 15 s or even less, everyday experience tells us that the voice of a person or a musical instrument can be recognized long after it was last heard. We wished to determine whether tones leave a lasting memory trace using an experimental model of implicit recognition and testing whether exact pitch information can be retrieved even after 30 s. Event-related brain potentials demonstrated the survival of an accurate representation of tone pitch in the auditory cortex. This result provides a link between short-duration buffering and permanent storage of acoustic information.