We've all come across certain people who seem to have a particularly high ability to play and/or appreciate music. As a geneticist, my assumption has always been that this is inherent and heritable to some degree. Nevertheless, it could certainly be argued that it is environmental.
The literature provides some support for the concept that musical ability is genetic. For example, musical talent has been noted to cluster in some families. Additionally, the ability to identify pitch in the absence of a reference pitch clusters in families, as well. Conversely, tone deafness, also known as congenital amusia, also seems to be genetic on the basis of strong familial clustering. Lastly, in a formal study of pitch recognition in twins, the heritability of scores on the so-called Distorted Tunes Test were estimated to be more than 70%.
Now, a Finnish research group has demonstrated that it is highly likely that a gene on chromosome 4 (located in the vicinity of chromosome band 4q22) influences musical aptitude. They utilized three different measures of musical aptitude in coming to this conclusion and performed a "genome-wide linkage test." This study has narrowed the region containing the gene to a segment of the chromosome containing ~50 genes, so further studies will be necessary to find the precise genetic change influencing musical aptitude in these families. The authors also noted other regions of the genome in which there was suggestive linkage, suggesting that musical aptitude is likely to be affected by multiple genes. It will be interesting to watch as these are hopefully identified in future studies.
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