PONE-D-24-54698Science of music-based citizen science: How seeing influences hearingPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Bedoya,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Two experts in the field have carefully reviewed the manuscript entitled “Science of music-based citizen science: How seeing influences hearing “. You can find their comments below. They both had very positive comments on the manuscript but also one of tthem requested clarifications of some parts and a new figure 7. 

In light of these reviews, I am requesting a minor revision and resubmission, in which you will need to respond to each point in the second review.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Bruno Alejandro Mesz, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: In the present study, participants annotated music segment boundaries for Ludwig van Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor, WoO 80 under unimodal (visual or auditory) or crossmodal (visual/aural) conditions. The annotations created web-based with CosmoNote were compared using boundary credence profiles and the optimal transport distance. The results show that visual inputs strengthen the global segmentation approach, while audio allows for smaller details and differentiation. Overall, audio and visual inputs facilitate annotations, with visual cues better capturing large structures and audio better capturing subtle nuances. However, a cross-modal stimulus has a greater overall advantage, especially in studies involving non-experts, such as citizen science projects.

Even though I may not fully have understood the mathematical derivation of the formulas for the boundary credence profiles and the optimal transport distance, the study fully convinced me with its clear research question, its clean and consistently applied method and its stringent discussion of the results obtained.

Reviewer #2: The article presents a rigorous investigation into cross-modal perception of music segments, demonstrating how visual representations (e.g., waveform or piano roll notations) can modify listeners' interpretation of musical structure within an auditory-only context. The proposed methodology is built around human-subject segmentation trials, and the statistical analysis of the results is conducted without a strict ground truth. Instead, the distribution over annotated boundaries is considered as a reference.

Overall, the text is clearly written and accessible, the "Distance metrics" section, however, was a little hard to follow. In particular the definition of uOT.

The article tackles a highly pertinent topic, and its contributions are presented throughout the text. However, fixing the following issues would significantly improve the manuscript:

- line 20: "such as going up in pitch and space" - please rephrase, "going up in space" sounds vague

- line 39: "eometrical" - typo

- Equation 2: what is k and n?

- line 246: Suggestion : "What is more, although a weighted variation of the technique is possible, as explained above, it fails

to capture the interactions between boundaries of different strength levels individually." (if -> although, strengths -> strength)

- line 267: "also called the ‘Earth mover’s distance’" (please add reference)

- line 276: Equation has no number (is this intentional?)

- line 286: "successively removing boundaries with a cost (c) while" - please specify c before using it on line 289

- line 287: "to to" typo

Figure 5: what are the 1-Falpha and uOT value ranges? Please add x-axis to the Figure.

Figure 7: Illegible. Please regenerate this image, there is no much to see in it. No legends, numbers are overlapping. Why MDS, and not PCA or TSNE?

Figure 8 and 9: Very good!

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Claudia Bullerjahn

Reviewer #2: Yes: Rodrigo Borges

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Science of music-based citizen science: How seeing influences hearing

PONE-D-24-54698R1

Dear Dr. Bedoya,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Bruno Alejandro Mesz, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: