The tonotopic organization of the auditory system plays a crucial role in facilitating efficient processing of diverse auditory information that appears to be conserved across mammalian species. Approaches to date have mostly used electrophysiological or static approaches to map the representation of sound frequencies within the rodent auditory system, meaning that a comprehensive mapping in real-time was not feasible. Here, we used 7-Tesla fMRI in awake male rats to simultaneously determine tonotopic frequency representations in cortical and subcortical structures. Presentation of four different frequencies (7.5, 15, 38, and 46 kHz) generated whole-brain clusters of activity, that enabled the identification of auditory regions, including sub-regions engaged in the perception of pure frequencies.The observed tonotopic organization in the rat auditory cortex enhances our understanding of how the brain processes different frequencies. The consistent and robust brain activation elicited by auditory stimulation in awake rats furthermore allows scrutiny of the hierarchical and tonotopic processing of sound frequencies in subcortical and cortical brain structures in real-time.Supported by the by the German Research Foundation (SFB 874/B10, project number: 122679504).