Though many studies suggest that fine acoustic details fade from memory after 15 s or even less, everyday experience tells us that the voice of a person or a musical instrument can be recognized long after it was last heard. We wished to determine whether tones leave a lasting memory trace using an experimental model of implicit recognition and testing whether exact pitch information can be retrieved even after 30 s. Event‐related brain potentials demonstrated the survival of an accurate representation of tone pitch in the auditory cortex. This result provides a link between short‐duration buffering and permanent storage of acoustic information.