Fecal microbiota profiling in patients with irritable bowel syndrome and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

Imagining music is a rich internal experience, yet decoding the content of imagined melodies from brain activity remains a major challenge. Most previous studies have focused on detecting music imagery or decoding coarse musical features, rather than reconstructing melodic structure itself. In this study, we demonstrate that imagined melodies can be decoded from human intracranial brain recordings by representing melody in terms of relative pitch, a fundamental principle of musical perception. Although decoding individual imagined notes is difficult, combining note-level predictions over time allows recovery of melodic contours that preserve the structure of imagined songs. These results show that structured internal musical representations can be accessed from neural signals and suggest a principled pathway toward decoding complex imagined auditory content. Melody is a fundamental component of music and can be defined as an ordered sequence of pitches characterized by their relative intervallic relationships (). It provides a distinctive identity that allows listeners to recognize and remember musical pieces across transpositions and changes in timbre. However, despite growing interest in music imagery, attempts to decode imagined music by explicitly predicting melodic structure remain scarce. Neurophysiological studies of music listening indicate that melodic information is supported by a distributed auditory network, prominently involving high gamma activity (HGA) in the superior temporal gyrus (STG; ; ). These regions are implicated in processing pitch height, interval structure, and melodic contour, thereby supporting the extraction of relational pitch information that defines melody (; ). Intracranial recordings further suggest that higher-frequency activity in auditory cortex tracks task-relevant auditory representations with high temporal precision, providing a useful substrate for decoding approaches ().