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The Brain's Auditory System: How You Hear Sound
At this point, your brain interprets your original plucking of the guitar string as a tone. Or, if you’re British, a note.
The whole process happens so fast it seems instantaneous. You pluck the guitar string, you hear the corresponding tone or note instantly.
If you’re listening to a song, depending on how well crafted the tune is, you may then experience an emotional reaction as your brain processes the music.
Being a parallel processor, your brain easily and automatically handles all the different sound processing tasks simultaneously.
Your brain may look up tones in a neural dictionary. The cortex of marmoset monkeys contains pitch-sensitive neurons, that is, neurons that actually code for pitch. These nerve cells respond to specific frequencies, which means that if the same holds true for humans (it’s likely), then the human brain stores a vocabulary or dictionary of different pitches, the way the brain stores a vocabulary of words.