Abstract: In auditory cortex, temporal patterns within a sound can be represented by either a neuron’s discharge rate or spike timing. While previous work has provided a detailed description of how temporal and rate codes represent acoustic information, what determines whether a neuron is a “rate” or “temporal” coder remains unclear. In this talk I will describe how three basic features of neural circuits- inhibition, adaptation, and recurrent connections can provide a parsimonious explanation of the diverse types of neural codes observed in auditory cortex.