Genetic Study Reveals Heritable Basis for Music Enjoyment

Music is central to human emotion and culture. Does our ability to enjoy music have a biological basis? A genetic twin study, published in Nature Communications, shows that music enjoyment is partly heritable. An international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, uncovered genetic factors that influence the degree of music enjoyment, which were partly distinct from genes influencing general enjoyment of rewarding experiences or musical ability.

Music plays an important role in human emotion, social bonding, and cultural expression. As Darwin already noted, music "must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed". But why do people enjoy music?

"The answer to this big question has the potential to open a window into more general aspects of the human mind, such as how experiences become pleasurable", says first author and PhD candidate Giacomo Bignardi. "We wanted to understand whether genetic differences between individuals can result in differences in the pleasure that people derive from music and what these differences can tell us about human musicality in general".

To determine whether genetic factors contribute to music enjoyment or 'music reward sensitivity', the researchers used the twin design, which compares similarities between identical twins and fraternal twins. Put simply, if identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, genetics should play a role.

In collaboration with the MPI for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the team was able to use data from more than 9,000 twins, including self-reported music reward and general reward sensitivity, as well as their ability to perceive musical features such as pitch, melody and rhythm.

The results show that the ability to experience pleasure from music is partly heritable: using the twin design, the researchers were able to estimate that 54% of the variability in the Swedish sample is associated with DNA differences between individuals.

The team also found genetic influences on music reward sensitivity to be partly independent of general reward sensitivity and music perceptual abilities, and discovered that distinct genetic pathways influenced different facets of music enjoyment, such as emotion regulation, dancing along with a beat or playing music with others.

"These findings suggest a complex picture in which partly distinct DNA differences contribute to different aspects of music enjoyment", concludes Bignardi. "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."