Most people enjoy music to some extent. But while some get goosebumps from their favorite song, others don’t really feel that much. A part of that is based on our culture. But according to one study, about half of it is written in our genes.
In one of the largest twin studies on musical pleasure to date, researchers have found that up to 54% of the variation in how much people enjoy music may be inherited.
Why do we even like music?
We don’t fully know why we like music, but science is getting closer. Music doesn’t offer clear survival benefits, yet it reliably evokes strong emotions and can nurture social connections. Some theories suggest it evolved as a tool for bonding or emotional communication, but others see it as a byproduct of more general cognitive abilities like pattern recognition or prediction.
This new study suggests genetics play a key role.
“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, in a press release. “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,” the researcher added.
The researchers used data from over 9,000 Swedish twins to study “music reward sensitivity”—a measure of how much pleasure people get from music. This was assessed using the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (which you can also take online). The questionnaire breaks musical enjoyment into five categories: emotional reactions, mood regulation, music seeking, pleasure from movement, and social bonding through music.
They also measured participants’ musical perception skills—like identifying pitch, rhythm, or melody—and general reward sensitivity, such as how much people typically enjoy pleasant experiences.
This let them ask a precise question: do people who love music simply have better hearing or stronger reward systems, or is musical enjoyment its own thing?
It’s its own thing
Genetics, as it turns out, plays a big role; but a nuanced one.
The twin study design allowed the team to estimate how much of the differences in musical enjoyment were due to genetics. Monozygotic twins, who share nearly all their genes, had more similar music enjoyment scores than dizygotic twins, who share about half their genes. From this, researchers calculated that music reward sensitivity has a heritability of 54%. It’s a rough calculation, but it highlights the importance of genes for appreciating music.
That number dropped slightly—to about 38%—after accounting for the effects of music perception and general reward sensitivity. This means that it’s not something related to reward sensitivity but something related to music in particular. It also suggests that there are distinct genetic pathways that shape our love for music—ones that aren’t just about hearing ability or whether we’re generally prone to enjoy things.
Interestingly, the team also found that different aspects of music enjoyment—such as feeling emotional versus enjoying social bonding through music—are influenced by partly different genetic factors. This seems to suggest that there’s not only one reason why we like music. Some people may feel an emotional trigger, while others may feel a social or bonding effect. In other words, music doesn’t affect everyone the same way for the same reasons.
“These results may indicate that future investigations… should focus on the separate facets rather than the total music reward sensitivity score,” the authors of the research concluded.
Source: ZME Science & Technology / Digpu NewsTex