After a right temporoparietal stroke, a left-handed man lost the ability to understand speech and environmental sounds, but developed greater appreciation for music. The patient had preserved reading and writing, but poor verbal comprehension. Slower speech, single-syllable words, and minimal written cues greatly facilitated his verbal comprehension. On identifying environmental sounds, he made predominant acoustic errors. Although he failed to name melodies, he could match, describe, and sing them. The patient had normal hearing except for presbyacusis, right-ear dominance for phonemes, and normal discrimination of basic psychoacoustic features and rhythm. Further testing disclosed difficulty distinguishing tone sequences and discriminating two clicks and short-versus-long tones, particularly in the left ear. Together, these findings suggest impairment in a direct route for temporal analysis and auditory word forms in his right hemisphere. The findings further suggest a separate and possibly rhythm-based mechanism for music recognition.