Home-based exercise training in boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy: A 12-month intervention study.

Music is one of the most universally experienced and emotionally powerful forms of human expression. Across cultures and contexts, it engages perceptual, affective, and cognitive systems in ways that are both deeply personal and socially shared. Despite its ubiquity, our scientific understanding of how listeners attend to specific elements within complex musical scenes remains limited. In other sensations such as visual domains, perceptual focus can be tracked directly through techniques like eye-tracking, enabling detailed comparisons of attentional behavior between novices and experts. In contrast, auditory domains—particularly music—lack analogous tools for objectively measuring attentional allocation. Unlike visual attention, which can be directly inferred from observable eye movements, auditory attention involves internal neural processes with no overt behavioral correlates. All auditory information is encoded and processed within the brain, primarily in the auditory cortex, making it inherently more challenging to detect and interpret from external measurements. Moreover, the neural representation of competing auditory streams remains only partially understood, further complicating efforts to track how listeners allocate attention in complex acoustic environments. This gap has hindered progress in understanding how the brain dynamically selects, filters, and engages with musical components during natural listening. Addressing this challenge is essential not only for advancing the neuroscience of music cognition, but also for enabling new technologies that adapt to the listener’s perceptual state in real time. Understanding how the human brain selectively attends to different auditory elements is a fundamental question in neuroscience. Although significant progress has been made in decoding auditory attention in speech-based paradigms—particularly in the classic “cocktail party” scenario, these studies primarily focus on linguistic content and directional cues, which are not necessarily central to musical listening. Some studies have investigated music-related attention using simple tones or isolated instrument streams, or pure tones, rather than naturalistic music. Furthermore, many of these studies rely on spatial listening paradigms, where different audio streams are presented separately to each ear or from distinct spatial locations, thereby confounding attentional focus with spatial cueing. In addition to music, there are BCI studies that introduce tactile stimuli as an additional sensory modality, where attention is distinguished between the left and right ears for music and between the left and right hands for tactile stimuli; however, this is also related to spatial attention. Most studies using real music focus on analyzing the brain’s functional responses to auditory stimuli under natural listening conditions. These works typically examine neural tracking of musical features such as onset and tempo, individual differences in EEG responses, or comparisons between musicians and non-musicians. Others focus more broadly on how music affects brain states from a neuroscientific perspective. Additional research explores the oddball paradigm in music, musical imagery or contrasts between speech and music. However, to our knowledge, no work has attempted to decode auditory attention in the context of studio-produced music characterized by real instrumentation, complex production, and diverse genres.