Table 1. Phenotypic characteristics of the participants.

Characteristic	Music-performance (N = 10)	Control study (N = 10)
Female	6	8
Age	48.3 ± 6.17; CI = 4.41	39.2 ± 11.31; CI = 8.09
Age at commencing of music practice	6.6 ± 1.71; CI = 1.23	5.7 ± 1.64; CI = 1.17
Average hours of practise/day	5.3 ± 0.82; CI = 0.59	4.3 ± 2.06; CI = 1.47
Keyboard musicians	0	3
String musicians	10	4
Wind musicians	0	3
University degree (B.Mus./Diploma/Master’s)	10	10

Note:

Participant demographic data are furnished in this table. Continuous explanatory variables—age, age at commencing of music practice and average hours of practice, are presented as the mean ± standard deviation with confidence interval (CI) at 95%. To assess the similarity of the music-performance and control participants, we performed two-sided t-tests to compare the age of commencement of musical practice, age of the participants and number of hours of musical practice per day. At 95% confidence, we did not find any significant (p < 0.05) differences in the age of commencement of musical practice, age of the participants and the number of hours of musical practice per day between music-performance and control groups. Additionally, we performed two-sided fisher’s exact test for count data to assess any statistically significant differences between the gender and music education level of the music-performance and control groups. However, at 95% confidence, we did not find any statistically significant differences in the gender of the participants between music-performance and control groups. Similarly, the education level of the performing musicians and the control group did not show any statistically significant differences from each other.