In the absence of visual information, our brain is able to recognize the actions of others by representing their sounds as a motor event. Previous studies have provided evidence for a somatotopic activation of the listenerʼs motor cortex during perception of the sound of highly familiar motor acts. The present experiments studied (a) how the motor system is activated by action-related sounds that are newly acquired and (b) whether these sounds are represented with reference to extrinsic features related to action goals rather than with respect to lower-level intrinsic parameters related to the specific movements. TMS was used to measure the correspondence between auditory and motor codes in the listenerʼs motor system. We compared the cortico-motor excitability in response to the presentation of auditory stimuli void of previous motor meaning before and after a short training period in which these stimuli were associated with voluntary actions. Novel cross-modal representations became manifest very rapidly. By disentangling the representation of the muscle from that of the actionʼs goal, we further showed that passive listening to newly learnt action-related sounds activated a precise motor representation that depended on the variable contexts to which the individual was exposed during testing. Our results suggest that the human brain embodies a higher-order audio-visuo-motor representation of perceived actions, which is muscle-independent and corresponds to the goals of the action.