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Event‐related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from the scalp to investigate a long‐standing controversy in auditory attention research, namely when the ‘breakthrough of the unattended’ takes place in the human brain. Nine subjects classified visual stimuli appearing 300 ms after task‐irrelevant standard tones (80%, i.e. P = 0.8) or novel sounds (20%, i.e. P = 0.2) into odd/even categories. After the recording session, subjects scored the novel sounds as to whether they had any particular meaning (identifiable) or were perceived as a burst of noise (non‐identifiable), and performance and ERPs were analysed according to this classification. A control condition, in which the visual stimuli were presented with no sounds, showed that subjects covertly monitored the task‐irrelevant sounds during visual task‐performance, and a further condition, in which the auditory and visual stimuli appeared regardless of each …