Impact of Music Played in an Automatic Milking System on Cows’ Milk Yield and Behavior—A Pilot Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

My comments may be found in the pdf file.  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

High milk production, animal welfare and behavior today are a great challenge for science, but also for practical production. Dear authors, You have shown a very interesting detail with your work. As music is also interesting for the behavior of the human population, it is to be expected that music also has an impact on the animals that humans use in agricultural production.

I believe that you will continue with further research and that you will provide the scientific public with new information on the impact of music on animal production and behavior.

I recommend your pilot study for publication.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This pilot study is very interesting and provides very novel results.  The manuscript is well written and I have a few specific comments.  They mostly relate to the statistical analysis section as I think more details can be added.

Line 20-21: I am not sure what this means (i.e. ceiling effect") I think it could be removed from the abstract.  

Line 123-129: Stat analysis.  I think the stat analysis section is very vague and more details need to be added.  How did you conduct the analysis?  What were the fixed effects?  Did you analyze by parity?  Were there parity effects?

Did you account for different music genres?

Line 131: Similar to stat analysis and these could be included in the stat analysis section.  What were the parametric and non-parametric tests conducted??   

Line 165: I am not sure why it is called a "ceiling effect"  I would just remove this term as it is confusing.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf