Recent research has demonstrated that a great deal of frequency specific information is available in evoked responses from the eighth nerve and the brain stem. In electrocochleography and brain‐stem evoked response audiometry very short tone bursts or pips (i.e., 2 ms duration with 1 ms rise/fall) are used to avoid artifacts. We questioned the extent to which frequency selectivity might be degraded by the use of such short and transient stimuli since physically they have substantially broader spectra than pure tones and subjectively they lack tonality. An automatic tracking procedure was used to obtain tuning functions from human subjects via a tone‐on‐tone masking paradigm. The results suggest that there is little loss in the apparent frequency selectivity with decreasing duration of the probe stimuli as long as the intensity of the tone pip is kept relatively low. Due to the threshold power integration phenomenon this means that sharp tuning may be seen only at sensation levels less than 10 dB for a pip of, say, 2 ms. The tips of the tuning functions seem to disappear at a set sound pressure level of the probe, regardless of duration. The implications for evoked response audiometry will be discussed. At this juncture it appears that, at least under certain conditions, responses elicited by even very brief tone bursts reflect an impressive degree of frequency specificity.