Got your headphones in and your playlist going while reading this? It might be because of your genes. A recent study on twins has led to a new finding. It provides evidence that how much a person enjoys music is partly influenced by genetic factors.
Initially published in Nature Communications, a multi-national team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and other institutions discovered that genetic differences influence over half of the variation in people’s sensitivity to music. To be clear, this result doesn’t apply to a person’s musical skill through singing, playing an instrument, or having any sense of rhythm by any means, but it influences music enjoyment. In short, your level of enjoyment of music might not be purely a byproduct of how your brain functions, but could have roots embedded in your genetic makeup. While many have studied music in terms of social bonding and culture, not many studies have looked into why some people enjoy music more than others.
The researchers presented a survey to 9,000 participants that they cultivated from the Swedish Twin Registry, a database consisting of thousands of adult twins. These participants were given the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ) survey to assess five key areas regarding music enjoyment: emotional reactions to music, the desire to seek out new music, the amount of pleasure of social bonding through music, using music to regulate mood, and the desire to enjoy moving to music (like dancing and head-bopping). Along with that, the researchers requested data to gauge each participant’s basic music perception abilities, such as the ability to discern pitch and rhythm, and a standard questionnaire about rewarding experiences to test whether their enjoyment of music was reflected on how well they heard it or how much they enjoyed generally enjoyable activities, or whether their musical enjoyment was based in their biology.
To further test the genetics-side of it all, the team of scientists applied statistical models comparing similarities of identical twins and fraternal twins. Given that identical twins share nearly the same genes with one another and fraternal twins only share about half, it was important to study that distinction.
After comparing those to the results of the survey, they found that identical twins were significantly more similar to one another in terms of musical enjoyment than fraternal twins, insinuating that there was indeed a genetic influence. Based on their findings, the researchers estimate that 54% of the variation in music enjoyment can be accredited to a person’s genes while the remaining 46% are from other factors such as past experiences, exposure, culture, etc.
The results also indicated that the five key areas of musical enjoyment partly overlapped with one another while each of them were a distinct factor in the results. Much like music itself, they all worked in different combinations and harmony to develop a person’s musical enjoyment. Environmental factors like personal life experiences didn’t show any shared pattern among the five key areas, leading the researchers to conclude that they were independent from them.
“These findings suggest a complex picture in which partly distinct DNA differences contribute to different aspects of music enjoyment,” said Giacomo Bignardi, the study’s lead author and a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute. “Future research looking at which part of the genome contributes the most to the human ability to enjoy music has the potential to shed light on the human faculty that baffled Darwin the most, and which still baffles us today.”
Bignardi is correct in that further research is needed, as it is assumed that the twins grew up in similar environments. On top of that, all of the sets of twins were Swedish and born between 1960 and 1980, so other studies with a wider variety of cultures, ages, and populations are needed to cement these findings.
However, these early studies so far confirm theories that music is a part of not just human cultural evolution, but actual evolution itself. Aside from social bonding, music has played a part in tribes developing language and sharing oral history. Lullabies are a part of every culture on Earth, to the point that we don’t know where the concept originated from.
Music is not only enjoyable, it’s good for us. It’s confirmed that listening to music reduces pain and makes time go faster in your mind when doing boring or uncomfortable tasks. Whether it is listening to it, playing an instrument, or singing, music not only stimulates the brain, but there is research that it lowers blood pressure, reduces anxiety, and helps with your memory.
So, if you want an excuse to turn up the volume on your Bluetooth speaker with your favorite songs, tell the folks around you that the music isn’t just for your brain and your health; it’s literally a part of your genetic makeup.
