We are able to recognize and understand speech across many different speakers, voice pitches and listening conditions. However, the acoustic waveform of a sound (e.g. for example the vowel “ae”) will vary considerably depending on the individual speaker. Moreover, the ear itself will filter the sound in a location-dependent fashion, and the “ae” may be embedded in a cacophony of other, background sounds in our often cluttered acoustic environments. Because we can perceive the pitch, timbre and spatial location of a sound source independently, it seems natural to suppose that cortical processing of sounds might separate out these attributes. However, recordings made in primary and secondary cortical areas of the ferret suggest that neural encoding of pitch, timbre and location is highly interdependent [1]. Moreover, sensitivity to these sound percepts was distributed throughout the cortical fields examined. In order to investigate whether these distributed responses might underlie pitch perception, we compared the performance of ferrets trained in a pitch discrimination task to the pitch discrimination abilities of auditory cortical neurons [2,3]. To achieve a more robust decoding of the neural responses, we developed a population neurometric analysis, with which we decoded the activity of ensembles of simultaneously recorded units. We found several parameters of the ensemble response to be informative; both spike count vectors and relative response latency vectors encoded stimulus pitch just as effectively. Our results thus suggest that count or latency based population codes could equally well account for the animal’s pitch discrimination ability. Neural populations capable of discriminating pitch as well as the animal did could be found throughout all five areas investigated. While these studies show that any of the 5 areas of ferret cortex could support the animal’s pitch judgment, further work is required to ascertain which, if any, of these fields make an essential contribution to pitch perception. In order to better understand how neural activity in auditory cortex might underlie an animal’s ability to discriminate pitch we have recorded from the auditory cortex of freely moving animals whilst they perform this task. By implanting arrays of 16 independently movable tungsten electrodes into left and right auditory cortex, under isoflurane anaesthesia (1-2%), we were able to examine both local field potential and single neuron spiking activity during the pitch discrimination. We found that the local field potential activity better discriminated the pitch change that the animal reported (i.e. its decision whether the target sound was “higher pitch” or “lower pitch” than the preceding reference) than the stimulus presented. We observed large changes in the amplitude and structure of the LFP signal when the animal was actively discriminating sounds compared to when passively listening. Furthermore, the LFP signal during behaviour was significantly better at discriminating the pitch of target sounds than the signals collected to the very same sounds during passive listening. Together these results suggest that neural activity in auditory cortex may represent more than simple acoustical features.