Scientists find genetic basis for how much people enjoy music

A new twin study published in Nature Communications provides evidence that how much people enjoy music is partly influenced by genetic factors. Researchers found that over half the variation in people’s sensitivity to musical pleasure can be traced back to genetic differences. These genetic influences appear to be mostly unique to musical enjoyment, rather than being shared with broader reward sensitivity or basic musical skills like pitch or rhythm perception. The findings add weight to the idea that music enjoyment is not simply a byproduct of general brain function, but may instead have distinct biological roots.

The study was led by an international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and other institutions, who set out to answer a longstanding question: Why do people find music so rewarding? Music is a universal human behavior and plays an important role in emotion, culture, and social bonding. Yet, the reasons why people enjoy it — and why some people enjoy it more than others — have remained elusive. By looking at genetic similarities between thousands of twins, the researchers aimed to determine how much of our response to music is shaped by biology versus environment.

To explore the biological basis of music enjoyment, the researchers used data from the Swedish Twin Registry, a large database that includes thousands of adult twins. Specifically, they analyzed responses from over 9,000 individuals who had completed the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (BMRQ), a survey designed to measure how much pleasure people experience from music. The questionnaire assesses five key areas: emotional reactions to music, using music to regulate mood, seeking out new music, enjoying movement related to music (like dancing), and the pleasure of social bonding through music.

In addition to measuring musical enjoyment, the researchers also gathered data on participants’ basic music perception abilities (such as pitch and rhythm discrimination) and their general sensitivity to rewarding experiences, using a standard psychological questionnaire. This allowed them to test whether musical enjoyment is simply a reflection of how well people hear music or how much they enjoy pleasurable experiences in general, or whether it is a distinct trait with its own biological roots.

To determine the influence of genetics, the team applied statistical models that compared similarities between identical twins (who share nearly all their genes) and fraternal twins (who share about half). They found that identical twins were significantly more similar to each other in how much they enjoyed music than fraternal twins were. This pattern suggests a genetic influence. Specifically, the researchers estimated that about 54% of the variation in music enjoyment could be attributed to genetic factors, with the remaining 46% explained by individual experiences and other non-genetic influences.

Importantly, the researchers found that this genetic influence on musical enjoyment was largely distinct from the genetic influence on music perception abilities or general reward sensitivity. Even after accounting for genes related to basic music skills or general pleasure-seeking behavior, nearly 40% of the variation in music enjoyment could still be traced to genetic factors unique to music enjoyment itself. This supports the idea that music enjoyment is not just a side effect of other brain functions, but a distinct capacity with its own biological foundation.

The study also revealed that the genetic contributions to music enjoyment are not uniform. Each of the five facets of musical enjoyment — emotional response, mood regulation, music seeking, sensory-motor pleasure, and social bonding — had partly overlapping, but also partly distinct, genetic influences. For example, the researchers found that the pleasure people get from the social aspects of music (such as bonding with others at concerts or singing in a group) was more strongly related to genes involved in basic music perception than other facets were. This could reflect the social bonding function of music in human evolution, an idea that has been proposed by several scholars.

Interestingly, the study did not find evidence for a single overarching genetic factor that influences all facets of music enjoyment equally. Instead, each facet had its own combination of genetic influences, suggesting that the ability to enjoy music is built from several interrelated but distinct components. This adds to a growing body of evidence that musicality is not a single trait, but a complex set of abilities and experiences, each with its own developmental and biological influences.

The researchers also looked at environmental influences on music enjoyment. They found that environmental effects, like personal life experiences, contributed to individual differences in music enjoyment but did not show a shared pattern across the five facets. In other words, the environmental influences on one person’s emotional response to music were largely independent from those affecting their enjoyment of music’s social aspects or their tendency to seek out new songs.

As with all twin studies, the findings are based on certain assumptions, such as the idea that identical and fraternal twins experience similar environments. While the researchers took care to address these assumptions and limitations, the results should be interpreted within this context. Additionally, the study was conducted with Swedish twins, most of whom were born between the 1960s and 1980s. This raises questions about whether the findings generalize to other populations, ages, or cultures.

Despite these limitations, the study offers important new insights into the biology of music enjoyment. It provides strong evidence that the pleasure we feel from music is not solely shaped by culture, learning, or personal experience, but is also influenced by our genes — and that different aspects of musical enjoyment may be shaped by different genetic pathways.

The findings could have broader implications for understanding how people respond to music, and even for investigating conditions like musical anhedonia — the inability to derive pleasure from music. They may also inform future research into the evolution of music and why it plays such a central role in human life.

“These findings suggest a complex picture in which partly distinct DNA differences contribute to different aspects of music enjoyment,” said Giacomo Bignardi, the study’s lead author and a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute. “Future research looking at which part of the genome contributes the most to the human ability to enjoy music has the potential to shed light on the human faculty that baffled Darwin the most, and which still baffles us today.”

The study, “Twin modelling reveals partly distinct genetic pathways to music enjoyment,” was authored by Giacomo Bignardi, Laura W. Wesseldijk, Ernest Mas-Herrero, Robert J. Zatorre, Fredrik Ullén, Simon E. Fisher, and Miriam A. Mosing.