Neural Entrainment to Musical Pulse in Naturalistic Music Is Preserved in Aging: Implications for Music-Based Interventions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for providing me with the opportunity to read your draft. It looks excellent to me and I could not detect major flaws. However, my own work does not entail EEG- or imaging methods. For those parts, I must leave judgments to other colleagues.

I only stumbled over the first line of the Discussion:

"While the present study is the first, to our knowledge, to assess neural entrainment
to music in a large corpus of naturalistic, participant-selected music across the lifespan, there are several limitations."

I think it would be better to write more content, something like: "The present study adds novel findings to the growing literature of self-selected music istening at a neurobiological level. Dispite the cross-sectional design that entails different age groups, some suggestions about the meaning of neural entrainment in response to  music listening across the lifespan appear to be in order."

Something like that would be more honest and less provocative.

 

 

Author Response

Thank you for reviewing this manuscript. We have now removed the sentence in question in the Discussion and changed it into the following, as suggested by the reviewer:

“The present study adds novel findings to the growing literature of self-selected music listening at a neurobiological level. Despite the cross-sectional design that entails different age groups, the study offers some suggestions about the meaning of neural entrainment in response to music listening across the lifespan.”

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a well-written manuscript reporting a study in 16 younger and 16 older adults where neural entrainment to the level of musical pulse was measured. The authors found that younger and older adults did not differ in this regard.

The study is well-designed, the technical methods of the audiovisual stimulation, the EEG, and the EEG data processing are timely.

However, the authors conclude that their findings can help design music-based interventions for healthy cognitive ageing. I cannot understand how such interventions would look like. Therefore, I would like to encourage the authors do describe the intervention they have in mind more specifically. Additionally, they should give a very brief outlook how trials could test the effectiveness of such interventions.

Author Response

Thank you for this point. In a previous theoretical article (Tichko et al, 2020), we had theorized that "combining [music-based interventions] with Gamma-frequency stimulation could increase the therapeutic power of MBIs by simultaneously targeting multiple biomarkers of dementia, restoring neural activity that underlies learning and memory (e.g., Gamma-frequency neural activity, Theta-Gamma coupling), and actively engaging auditory and reward networks in the brain to promote behavioural chang

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript, and thank you for this point. In a previous theoretical article (Tichko et al, 2020), we had theorized that "combining [music-based interventions] with Gamma-frequency stimulation could increase the therapeutic power of MBIs by simultaneously targeting multiple biomarkers of dementia, restoring neural activity that underlies learning and memory (e.g., Gamma-frequency neural activity, Theta-Gamma coupling), and actively engaging auditory and reward networks in the brain to promote behavioural change."

Here we add the following to the present Discussion section:

“Future music-based interventions may capitalize on the phase-locking between self-selected music and endogenous brain rhythms, and the phase-amplitude coupling of different frequency bands of endogenous brain rhythms (such as between delta, theta, and gamma bands), to design novel music-based interventions that couple visual stimulation and musical rhythms for gamma-based multimodal brain stimulation (see Tichko et al, 2020).”

e."

Future music-based interventions may capitalize on the phase-locking between self-selected music and endogenous brain rhythms, and the phase-amplitude coupling of different frequency bands of endogenous brain rhythms (such as between delta, theta, and gamma bands), to design novel music-based interventions that couple visual stimulation and musical rhythms for gamma-based multimodal brain stimulation (see Tichko et al, 2020). 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx