The auditory system transforms sound waves into distinct patterns of neural activity, which are then integrated with information from other sensory systems to guide behavior, including orienting movements to acoustical stimuli and intraspecies communication. The first stage of this transformation occurs at the external and middle ears, which collect sound waves and amplify their pressure, so that the sound energy in the air can be successfully transmitted to the fluid-filled cochlea of the inner ear. In the inner ear, a series of biomechanical processes occur that break up the signal into simpler, sinusoidal components, with the result that the frequency, amplitude, and phase of the original signal are all faithfully transduced by the sensory hair cells and encoded by the electrical activity of the auditory nerve fibers. One product of this process of acoustical decomposition is the systematic representation of sound frequency along the length of the cochlea, referred to as tonotopy, which is an important feature preserved throughout the central auditory pathways. The earliest stage of central processing occurs at the cochlear nucleus, where the peripheral auditory information diverges into a number of parallel central pathways. Accordingly, the output of the cochlear nucleus has several targets. One of these is the superior olivary complex, the first place that information from the two ears interacts and the site of the initial processing of the cues that allow us to localize sound in space. The cochlear nucleus also projects to the inferior colliculus of the midbrain, a major integrative center and the first place where auditory information can interact with the motor system. The inferior colliculus is an obligatory relay for information traveling to the thalamus and cortex, where additional integrative aspects of sound that are especially germane to speech (such as sound combinations that vary over time) are processed.