Sensations of tone, including violin tone, come partly from evoked matrices generated within the brain. Cited evidence from electrodes permanently implanted in the brains of conditioned cats shows that an incoming signal evokes generation of temporally patterned recurrences. The cat acts appropriately for the signal when coincidence exists between the input and the internally generated pattern. An adequately functioning nervous system experiences tone from input of regularly repeating waves, such as are compatible with neural temporal recurrence, but human patients with some neural handicaps, including vertebral artery insufficiency, commonly experience noise instead of tone from smooth sine wave input, presumably because of inadequate internal generation or coincidence detection. The normal human nervous system, with many neurons responding only to change, is not a steady‐state apparatus, yet it uses temporal recurrence with an appetite for regularity. Human preference for regularity and change can be observed when a master plays a violin which is thus physiologically controlled.