A number of animals are good potential models for the neuronal processing that is thought to occur in the human primary auditory cortex or earlier auditory processing stages. What is less clear is which animal can reasonably model human vocal recognition abilities that are often associated with linguistic processing and are thus thought to be unique. We used highresolution functional imaging (fMRI) of macaque monkeys to evaluate the cortical sensitivity for the vocal communications of conspecific individuals. We identified a candidate ‘voice’ area in the monkey which was localized to a high-level processing stage of auditory cortex, in the anterior portions of the superior-temporal plane. This monkey region was sensitive to both the acoustics in species-specific vocalizations (the ‘voice’ of the species) and to the identity of the monkeys that produced the vocalizations. These functional properties closely correspond to those reported for the well-known human voice area and seem to reveal an evolutionarily conserved region of the primate brain that supports different vocal recognition abilities. To understand what is special about species-specific vocalizations that give rise to this region’s sensitivity, we manipulated either the fundamenta