Genetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability

Daniel Yeom; Yi Ting Tan; Nick Haslam; Miriam A Mosing; Valerie M Z Yap; Trisnasari Fraser; Michael S Hildebrand; Sam F Berkovic; Gary E McPherson; Isabelle Peretz; Sarah J Wilson

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104360

Genetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability

iScience. 2022 May 6;25(6):104360. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104360. eCollection 2022 Jun 17.

Authors

Daniel Yeom¹, Yi Ting Tan^{1

2}, Nick Haslam¹, Miriam A Mosing^{1

3

4}, Valerie M Z Yap¹, Trisnasari Fraser^{1

2}, Michael S Hildebrand^{5

6}, Sam F Berkovic⁵, Gary E McPherson², Isabelle Peretz^{1

7}, Sarah J Wilson^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia.
² Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Southbank, VIC 3006, Australia.
³ Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden.
⁴ Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, 17177 Stockholm, Sweden.
⁵ Department of Medicine, Epilepsy Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Austin Health, Heidelberg, VIC 3084, Australia.
⁶ Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Royal Children's Hospital, Parkville, VIC 3052, Australia.
⁷ International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research and Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC H2V 2S9, Canada.

Abstract

Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three everyday singing tasks in Australian twins (n = 1189) to explore the relative genetic and environmental influences on singing ability. We derived a reproducible phenotypic index for singing ability across five performance measures of pitch and interval accuracy. Using this index we found moderate heritability of singing ability (h ² = 40.7%) with a striking, similar contribution from shared environmental factors (c ² = 37.1%). Childhood singing in the family home and being surrounded by music early in life both significantly predicted the phenotypic index. Taken together, these findings show that singing ability is equally influenced by genetic and shared environmental factors.

Keywords: anthropology; quantitative genetics.