Publication Date:
2001-03-10
Description:
We used a twin study to investigate the genetic and environmental contributions to differences in musical pitch perception abilities in humans. We administered a Distorted Tunes Test (DTT), which requires subjects to judge whether simple popular melodies contain notes with incorrect pitch, to 136 monozygotic twin pairs and 148 dizygotic twin pairs. The correlation of DTT scores between twins was estimated at 0.67 for monozygotic pairs and 0.44 for dizygotic pairs. Genetic model-fitting techniques supported an additive genetic model, with heritability estimated at 0.71 to 0.80, depending on how subjects were categorized, and with no effect of shared environment. DTT scores were only weakly correlated with measures of peripheral hearing. This suggests that variation in musical pitch recognition is primarily due to highly heritable differences in auditory functions not tested by conventional audiologic methods.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Drayna, D -- Manichaikul, A -- de Lange , M -- Snieder, H -- Spector, T -- Z01-DC-00043-03/DC/NIDCD NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2001 Mar 9;291(5510):1969-72.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, 5 Research Court, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11239158" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Adolescent
;
Adult
;
Aged
;
Chi-Square Distribution
;
Environment
;
Female
;
*Genes
;
Hearing
;
Humans
;
Middle Aged
;
Models, Genetic
;
Models, Statistical
;
*Pitch Perception
;
Twins, Dizygotic
;
Twins, Monozygotic
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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