This paper presents a new method for the selection of sinusoidal components for use in compact representations of narrowband audio. The method consists of ranking and selecting the most perceptually relevant sinusoids. The idea behind the method is to maximize the matching between the auditory excitation pattern associated with the original signal and the corresponding auditory excitation pattern associated with the modeled signal that is being represented by a small set of sinusoidal parameters. The proposed component-selection methodology is shown to outperform the maximum signal-to-mask ratio selection strategy in terms of subjective quality.