Genes have a significant part in developing musical skills.
What our genes reveal about our musicality
Not everyone has a sense of rhythm, but can being able to clap in sync with a beat reveal anything about a person's general musicality? The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics explored this subject as part of an international research team. The findings of the research team were recently published in the open-access journal Scientific Reports.
A total of 5,648 research participants donated their DNA, answered music-related questionnaires, and conducted music-related exercises. They were tested on their ability to identify rhythm, melody, and pitch, among other things. The scientists estimated each participant's polygenic score, or PGS, for beat synchronization ability, i.e., rhythm, based on their DNA. As a result, this score acted as an indicator of a person's genetic basis for their sense of rhythm.
"We discovered that the PGSrhythm could predict participants' overall musicality because genetic variants that inform beat synchronization ability are related to other aspects of musicality, including not only people's abilities to follow a melody or distinguish rhythm or pitch, but also the amount of time they spend practicing or listening to music in general," says first author Laura Wesseldijk of the MPIEA.
The researchers were able to analyze alternative within-family genetic paths that PGSrhythm may have followed to impact musical ability since the study participants were all pairs of twins who grew up in the same homes. This covered both direct and indirect impacts, as well as confounding factors. They concluded that PGSrhythm most likely had a direct influence on musical ability.
Gene-environment interaction
Furthermore, the researchers discovered a link between PGSrhythm and the degree of musical richness in a study participant's early milieu, indicating a gene-environment interaction. In other words, a person's genetic proclivity for music influences their environmental exposure (e.g., whether or not they attend music lessons).
The outcomes of the study reveal that PGSrhythm may predict not only a person's general musicality, but also, along with the ability to dance, their proclivity to enjoy and engage with music. Thus, the polygenic score may be utilized with confidence in future studies to investigate the genetics underlying individual variations in music talents and to untangle gene-environment interactions.
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