Some people can pick up a song on a guitar like that.
Or they can hear when someone’s singing is just a little bit out of tune.
Or maybe they themselves sing really out of tune.
But why is that?
Is music something that we learn, or is it just ... a part of us?
A new study, published in the Royal Society B, has surveyed all of the recent research
that has asked this question, and concludes that music may in fact be in our DNA.
Studies over the past 30 years have suggested that musical phenotypes, or observable traits,
have corresponded with familial clustering -- that is, when relatives express the same
aptitude or inaptitude for music.
Take amusia for example, also known as tone-deafness, the inability to detect notes that are out
of key.
Around 3 percent of the world’s population has amusia.
I’m sure you’ve heard them at karaoke bars.
In 2007, scientists tested the family members of 9 people who had amusia, and found that
39 percent of their first-degree relatives - like brothers, sisters, mom, and dad -- also
had the condition.
But on the other end of the scale, there’s Absolute Pitch, or AP, which is the ability
to precisely identify and produce a musical note without any reference.
So, a person with AP could hear this sound … and know that it’s A sharp, without
first having to hear any other notes to compare it to.
It might sound pretty easy- it’s not.
It’s very rare.
A small study in 1988 showed that, among identical twins, if one twin is found to have AP, there’s
a 79 percent chance that the other will too.
The likelihood is only 45 percent if the twins are non-identical.
This could mean that there’s a relationship between musical aptitude and familial clustering
... but this relationship could also be environmental, rather than genetic, since twins typically
grow up together.
But in the last few years, scientists have begun identifying gene expressions that may
relate directly to musicality.
For instance, a few studies have found a connection between the ability to remember music and
perceive musical structures -- like, choruses, bridges, and note changes -- to the expression
of two specific genes:
If you’re keeping track at home, they are arginine vasopressin receptor 1a, or AVPR1A,
and a serotonin transporter gene called SLC684.
The researchers stress that these ARE NOT the only two genes that may relate to music.
Because music itself is so wonderfully complex, the scientists theorize that our genes, too,
may work like a symphony, with different combinations of expressions allowing for different musical
strengths.
According to this week’s study, the next step is to create a worldwide musicality test
for children with no formal musical training, to help weed out environmental and cultural
factors.
Only then, they say, can science identify the potential orchestra of genes that helps
us create and understand music.
Now, speaking of your genes, you most likely share some of yours with a lot of different
ancient, extinct hominins -- that’s the taxonomic term for members of the genus Homo.
Hominins include Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, Homo sapiens, and the hobbit-like Homo floresiensis.
And last week, scientists announced that they might have discovered a previously unknown
species of hominin in Taiwan.
Researchers analyzed the intact, fossilized, lower jaw of a hominin called Penghu 1, which
was dredged up by a fishing net in a Taiwanese sea channel.
Penghu 1 is between 100,000 to 200,000 years old, and has bigger teeth and a more robust
jaw than the many of the Homo erectus mandibles found from that period -- known as the Pleistocene
-- in that part of Asia.
It also looks different from the fourteen other known hominins that were wandering around
Earth during the middle Pleistocene.
In fact, there’s only one other hominin fossil that it looks like.
Penghu 1 closely resembles a 400,000 year old jaw found in Northern China, which has
also been puzzling anthropologists due to its robustness.
So, scientists hypothesize that the two jaws might come from a previously unknown species
of hominin that once lived in Asia ... but they say they need more fossils to compare,
if they’re going to establish where this human fits into our family tree.
At this point, the two jaws could be anomalies, coincidences, or the result of interbreeding
between two different hominins, which isn’t unheard of.
For most of us, anywhere between 1 to 4 percent of DNA actually came from Neanderthals.
Which makes me wonder if they were any good at music.
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