Journal article
Genetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability
D Yeom, YT Tan, N Haslam, MA Mosing, VMZ Yap, T Fraser, MS Hildebrand, SF Berkovic, GE McPherson, I Peretz, SJ Wilson
Iscience | Published : 2022
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 (h2 = 40.7%) with a ..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank all the twins for their participation in the study. We thank Dr. LauraWesseldjik for reviewing the R code and outputs for the univariate genetic analysis, and for her valuable input on the analyses. We also thank Mark Solly and Oscar Correa for their work in developing the Melbourne Singing Tool. This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant (DP170102479) and an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. This research was facilitated through access to Twins Research Australia, a national resource supported by a Centre of Research Excellence Grant (ID: 1079102), from the National Health and Medical Research Council. The graphical abstract was created with BioRender (www.biorender.com).