Functional diversity-i.e., the diversity of morphophysiological characteristics of species in a biological community-revolutionized ecology in recent decades, shifting the focus of the field from species to ecosystems. While its ecological applications are known, its adaptability to other disciplines, specifically music, is explored here. We retrieved fourteen characteristics of 12,944 songs by the top 100 artists of the 2010s decade on four streaming platforms. Then, we calculated the three main components of functional diversity-richness, evenness, and divergence-to each artist using probabilistic hypervolumes. Furthermore, we investigated to what extent functional diversity and the traits of an artist, its albums and songs has an effect on their popularity across streaming platforms such as Spotify. High functional richness, where an artist\'s songs differ greatly sonically, correlated with increased listens of up to 244,300,000. This would lead to estimated profit earnings exceeding $1,000,000 per richness gain. Danceable, highly-energetic, melodic, pop, and, notably, melancholic songs, albums, and artists are more listened to than their counterparts in streaming services. We captured how patterns in human song might reflects the social state of human societies in recent years and demonstrate the potential of applying functional diversity concepts and tools across scientific and economic domains, extending its relevance beyond ecology. By demonstrating applications of state-of-the-art functional diversity metrics using music as a case study, we intent to communicate the often-complex concepts of functional diversity using the familiar realm of music, which is an intrinsic trait of human cultures across the globe.

This paper explored the effectiveness of ensemble performance on the development of adolescent\'s life skills. An explorative qualitative study investigated young musicians\' self-perception about the benefits and challenges of learning and playing music together. A convenience sampling technique was adopted for interviewing 15 adolescents (12-18 years old) who participated in a long-term music education programme led by a charity in the North-West of England. The data were analysed using NVivo, employing a thematic analysis approach. Two main themes emerged from the analyses: (1) the main benefits of playing and learning in an ensemble: the development of music and life skills; (2) the challenges experienced by the musicians learning in the ensemble. The findings suggest that participants were conscious of the positive effects of playing in an ensemble on their lives. This extended beyond merely learning a musical instrument, i.e. acquiring music skills. In particular, young musicians recognised they had developed greater self-confidence and cognitive skills such as critical thinking and self-awareness. Primarily, they developed effective communication and interpersonal skills. At the same time, these young musicians recognised they had to face challenges related to the process of learning music in an ensemble, such as managing emotions of frustration and adapting to different music learning styles and techniques. Finally, suggestions are made for the implementation and evaluation of future projects to explore the impact and effectiveness of classical music programmes, with a particular emphasis on ensemble-based initiatives and their influence on life skills.

BACKGROUND: The role of patients in healthcare research is slowly evolving, although patient roles in the research process are limited. This paper reports on a patient-led research project aiming to develop a musical hearing training programme for patients with a cochlear implant (CI): the Musi-CI programme. A CI is an inner ear prosthesis that allows people with severe hearing loss to hear. However, while speech can be understood, CI users cannot fully enjoy music or feel aversion to it. The Musi-CI programme aims to reduce this music aversion to ultimately improve music enjoyment and social participation. The development of the Musi-CI programme was supported by a consortium of professionals in CI rehabilitation and research. The aim of this paper is to describe and evaluate the Musi-CI programme development process and its impact on professional CI rehabilitation and research.
METHODS: Programme development was described using a 3-layered process model of action research, distinguishing the CI user process, the healthcare professional process and the research process. To evaluate perceptions on the programme development process, consortium partners provided written comments and participated in a reflexive evaluation session that was video-recorded. Reflexive evaluation aims for collective learning and strengthening collaboration among participants. Written comments and video data were analysed using template analysis.
RESULTS: The involvement of an expert by experience was perceived as challenging but rewarding for all consortium partners, opening up new perspectives on CI-rehabilitation practice and research. Data analysis revealed two themes on the programme development process, professional space and acknowledgement, and two themes on the outcomes on CI rehabilitation and research: critical reflection and paradigm shift.
CONCLUSIONS: Experts by experience represent a different knowledge domain that may contribute to change in rehabilitation and research.
UNASSIGNED: The development of the programme was initiated by a professional musician and CI user who organized the funding, had a leading role throughout the research process, including the write-up of the results, and co-authored this paper.

Task-specific dystonia leads to loss of sensorimotor control for a particular motor skill. Although focal in nature, it is hugely disabling and can terminate professional careers in musicians. Biomarkers for underlying mechanism and severity are much needed. In this study, we designed a keyboard device that measured the forces generated at all fingertips during individual finger presses. By reliably quantifying overflow to other fingers in the instructed (enslaving) and contralateral hand (mirroring) we explored whether this task could differentiate between musicians with and without dystonia. 20 right-handed professional musicians (11 with dystonia) generated isometric flexion forces with the instructed finger to match 25%, 50% or 75% of maximal voluntary contraction for that finger. Enslaving was estimated as a linear slope of the forces applied across all instructed/uninstructed finger combinations. Musicians with dystonia had a small but robust loss of finger dexterity. There was increased enslaving and mirroring, primarily during use of the symptomatic hand (enslaving p = 0.003; mirroring p = 0.016), and to a lesser extent with the asymptomatic hand (enslaving p = 0.052; mirroring p = 0.062). Increased enslaving and mirroring were seen across all combinations of finger pairs. In addition, enslaving was exaggerated across symptomatic fingers when more than one finger was clinically affected. Task-specific dystonia therefore appears to express along a gradient, most severe in the affected skill with subtle and general motor control dysfunction in the background. Recognition of this provides a more nuanced understanding of the sensorimotor control deficits at play and can inform therapeutic options for this highly disabling disorder.

UNASSIGNED: To examine how music can impact preoperative and intraoperative anxiety via assessment of physiological markers such as pupil size, blood pressure, pulse rate, and respiratory rate.
UNASSIGNED: This is a randomized interventional study of individuals aged 50 years and above who were scheduled for and undergoing cataract surgery under regional anesthesia, with music (test group) randomly matched with similar individuals undergoing the same procedure but without music (control group). The surgeries were performed in the operating theater of the Department of Ophthalmology, University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), Ituku-Ozalla, Enugu. Using a systematic random sampling method, a total of 98 patients were grouped into two. Both groups completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) questionnaire at baseline, immediately upon entrance into the preoperative room and 5 min after intervention. Relevant study indices (blood pressure, pulse, respiratory rate, and pupil diameter) were measured and recorded, and these served as baseline parameters. The STAI questionnaire was then administered. Results were analyzed using the SPSS version 20 and analysis of variance was used to compare means of variables measured at baseline, preoperative before intervention, and preoperative after intervention. Categorical variables were compared using the Chi-square test. Student\'s t-test was used to analyze the continuous variables.
UNASSIGNED: Our analysis, using the multiple linear regression, showed that music has an effect on preoperative anxiety and intraoperative anxiety by positively affecting the blood pressure, pulse rate, respiratory rate, and pupil diameter (P ≤ 0.001).
UNASSIGNED: Music reduces preoperative and intraoperative anxiety evidenced by its effect on the physiological biomarkers.

UNASSIGNED: To investigate the association of musical activity with mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
UNASSIGNED: A total of 3,666 participants reported their musical activity before and mental health indicators before and during the pandemic. Depression was assessed with the Patient Health Questionnaire, anxiety with the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale. The association between mental health scores and musical activities was investigated using linear regression.
UNASSIGNED: Within the last 12 months, 22.1% of the participants reported musical activity (15.1% singing, 14.5% playing an instrument). Individuals with frequent singing as their main musical activity had higher scores before the pandemic than non-musicians and the worsening during the pandemic was more pronounced compared to non-musicians. Instrumentalists tended to have slightly lower scores than non-musicians indicating a possible beneficial effect of playing an instrument on mental health.
UNASSIGNED: The pandemic led to a worsening of mental health, with singers being particularly affected. Singers showed poorer mental health before the pandemic. The tendency for instrumentalists to report lower depression scores compared to non-musicians may support the hypothesis that music-making has a beneficial effect on health.

Rhythmic entrainment is a fundamental aspect of musical behavior, but the skills required to accurately synchronize movement to the beat seem to develop over many years. Motion capture studies of corporeal synchronization have shown immature abilities to lock in to the beat in children before age 5, and reliable synchronization ability in adults without musical training; yet there is a lack of data on full-body synchronization skills between early childhood and adulthood. To document typical rhythmic synchronization during middle childhood, we used a wireless motion capture device to measure period- and phase-locking of full body movement to rhythm and metronome stimuli in 6 to 11 year-old children in comparison with adult data. Results show a gradual improvement with age; however children\'s performance did not reach adult levels by age 12, suggesting that these skills continue to develop during adolescence. Our results suggest that in the absence of specific music training, full-body rhythmic entrainment skills improve gradually during middle childhood, and provide metrics for examining the continued maturation of these skills during adolescence.

This study aimed to assess and compare changes in body composition, standing balance, cardiovascular parameters, and salivary biomarkers, particularly salivary antioxidant status, after brisk walking training with or without music in older women. Twenty-four subjects were randomly assigned to brisk walking groups: with music (BWM) (n=12) or without music (BW) (n=12). Eighteen subjects completed the exercise training (9 in each group), and their data were used for analysis. The research protocols were classified into three phases: pretraining phase, training phase, and posttraining phase, while the data collection was divided into four sessions: resting condition, during treadmill exercise testing, immediately posttreadmill exercise testing, and 5-min posttreadmill exercise testing defined as after the cool-down session. The results showed that 8 weeks of home-based brisk walking with or without music did not improve standing balance, blood pressure, salivary biomarkers including total protein concentration, and antioxidant status but maintained or prevented the decline of these parameters. Only the BWM group reduced fat mass relative to increasing fat-free mass (P<0.05) and improved recovery heart rate (P<0.05) by modifying cardiac autonomic control in posttreadmill exercise testing. Therefore, brisk walking with preferred music can be a tool to delay the progression of cardiovascular dysfunction in older women. A longer duration of the exercise program and larger groups of participants are needed for further investigation of brisk walking with or without music on physiological and biochemical changes.

People with spinal cord injury (SCI) experience respiratory dysfunctions which include hypersecretions, bronchospasm, and respiratory muscles weakness. Singing therapy has been implemented as part of respiratory muscle training (RMT) to improve their muscle strength. Singing different types and genres of songs may elicit specific recruitment of respiratory muscles, attributed to the variation of the songs\' characteristics including tempo, pitch, and rhythmic complexity. This study aims to determine the effect of singing songs with different characteristics on the accessory respiratory muscle performance among people with SCI. Thirteen male SCI participants of ASIA A and B (C4 -T11) were recruited. Respiratory muscle signals were retrieved by placing two mechanomyography (MMG) sensors on the sternocleidomastoid (SCM) and rectus abdominis (RA) muscles. Eight music experts categorized several songs into four categories based on their pitch, tempo, and rhythmic complexity. Each participant sang one song from each category. Findings showed statistically significant difference in RA and SCM responses among all categories (P < 0.01). The SCM muscle is most active while singing high pitch songs. While the RA is most active during slow tempo and easy rhythmic complexity. This shows that different accessory respiratory muscle is activated by people with SCI while singing songs with different characteristics. Clinicians could benefit from this knowledge while prescribing singing therapy or exercise among people with SCI in the future.

In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify \"melodic revolutions\", changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity, were located. The revolutions divided the time series into three eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. Linear regression of autoregression residuals underscored inter-feature relationships, which become stronger in post-2000 melodies. The overriding pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.