The principles that the auditory cortex uses to decipher a stream of acoustic information have remained elusive. Neural responses in the animal auditory cortex can be broadly classified into transient and sustained activity. We examined the existence of similar principles in the human brain. Sound-evoked, blood oxygen level-dependent signal response was decomposed temporally into independent transient and sustained constituents, which predominated in different portions-core and belt-of the auditory cortex. Converging with unit recordings, our data suggest that this spatiotemporal pattern in the auditory cortex may represent a fundamental principle of analyzing sound information.