Time is a critical dimension for speech,music,and auditory perception.For example,in speech,the ordering of syllables decides whether a sentence is "a cat chases a dog" or "a dog chases a cat".Similarly,a melody critically depends on the ordering of musical notes.When listening to speech and many other complex sounds,cortical activity is synchronized/entrained to the temporal structure of the input.I will discuss how neural synchronization to stimulus temporal structure contributes to speech perception,from the encoding of basic acoustic features to the grouping of syllables into larger linguistic structures such as phrases.It is argued that low-frequency neural oscillations provide a plausible mechanism for the encoding of the temporal structures of sound.