For animals to thrive in their natural environments, their sensory systems must form representations of complex objects that are invariant to changes in some physical dimensions. For example, we can recognize a friend’s voice in a forest, a small office, and a cathedral, even though the acoustics of the sound reaching our ears will be very different in these 3 settings. I will discuss how neurons in auditory cortex can form stable representations of sounds in our acoustically varied world. Our 2-photon calcium imaging experiments in ferrets have highlighted the complexity of frequency receptive fields in auditory cortex, and how these are arranged along the tonotopic map. Furthermore, we have used statistical modelling and Neuropixels recordings to better understand how the brain recognizes sounds across rooms with different levels of reverberation. Our results demonstrate that the neural “de-reverberation” process is dynamic and adaptive, even in anaesthetized ferrets. Together, these frequency integration and adaptation processes allow neurons in auditory cortex to effectively represent our complex and dynamic acoustic environments. Further studies are needed to dissect these processes at the level of neural circuits.