Music is a language everyone understands, but some people get more pleasure than others from listening to it. Now, a new study suggests that our taste for music may be inscribed in our DNA.
An international research team, led by Giacomo Bignardi of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, set out to determine the extent to which genetics influences musical enjoyment. To do so, they examined the level of pleasure experienced by over 9,000 twins, registered in the Swedish Twin Registry, when listening to music.
Some of the twins were identical, sharing the same genetic makeup, while some were fraternal, sharing only half of their genome. In either case, all the twins grew up in the same families, which made it easier for researchers to determine the influence of genetics on musical enjoyment.
The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire evaluating the pleasure they derived from listening to music. They were asked to state the extent to which they agreed with statements such as “when I share music with someone I feel a special connection with that person”, and “in my free time I hardly listen to music”.
The findings reveal that genetics seems to play an important role in the degree of pleasure derived from music. Identical twins gave more similar answers to the questionnaire than siblings who share only 50% of their DNA.
The researchers, therefore, suggest that when it comes to music, we may be far more subject to the power of our genes than we might imagine. Indeed, previous research has shown the existence of genetic predispositions to musical ability.
The experts also tested the participants’ ability to distinguish between different melodies, rhythms and pitches, and concluded that the pleasure of listening to music is not based on genetics in and of itself.
“The results do not support a single genetic dimension of musical enjoyment. Instead, these findings are consistent with musical enjoyment being built upon genetically interconnected yet distinct parts,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
The findings are intriguing but should be treated with caution: it should not be forgotten that musical preferences are strongly influenced by culture and even country of residence. However, they seem to be much more governed by our DNA than previously thought.