Here is the abstract of the twin study on musical ability that was
discussed in my last post. You can download the complete article from
Science for $5. The article shows that the writiers did test one
by-product hypothesis about musical ability: they determined whether
musical pitch perception was related to the overall quality of the
subjects' hearing and determined there was only a very weak correlation
between the two abilities. That is, even if you're hard of hearing, you
may be able to discern pitch better than someone whose hearing is perfect.
Ian Jobling
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Friday, March 09, 2001, 8:22 AM +0000
From: Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford@scientist.com>
To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [evol-psych] Genetic Correlates of Musical Pitch Recognition in
Humans
> Volume 291, Number 5510, Issue of 9 Mar 2001, pp. 1969-1972
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/291/5510/1969
>
> Genetic Correlates of Musical Pitch Recognition in Humans
> Dennis Drayna,1* Ani Manichaikul,1 Marlies de Lange,2 Harold Snieder,2 Tim
> Spector2
>
> 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.
>
> 1 National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders,
> National Institutes of Health, 5 Research Court, Rockville, MD 20850, USA.
> 2 Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit, St. Thomas' Hospital,
> London, SE1 7EH, UK.
> * To whom correspondence should be addressed.
>
> Present address: Georgia Prevention Institute, Medical College of Georgia,
> Building HS-1640, Augusta, GA 30912, USA.
>
> Full text, pay per view:
> http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5510/1969
>
> ______
>
> THE GUARDIAN
> Song in your heart is written in your genes
> Tim Radford, science editor
> Guardian
>
> Friday March 9, 2001
>
> Karaoke kings and queens are born, not made, according to a study of the
> musical ability of twins.
>
> A team from the National Institute on Deafness in the US and St Thomas's
> hospital in London studied 284 pairs of female twins and found that the
> ability to tell the wrong notes in a familiar tune was inherited.
>
> The researchers, who report in the journal Science today, played the
> women a medley of 26 familiar songs - including Silent Night and God Save
> the Queen - some of which contained altered notes. Identical twins, who
> have identical genes and upbringings, tended to get the same scores.
> Non-identical twins, with similar backgrounds but different genes, had
> different results.
>
> Full text:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4148805,00.html
>
>
> Read The Human Nature Daily Review every day
> http://human-nature.com/nibbs/
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>
>
---------- End Forwarded Message ----------
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