Does the ability to enjoy music have a biological basis? A study recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications shows that enjoyment of music is partly hereditary. An international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has investigated how genetic and environmental factors influence our enjoyment of music.
Frankfurt a. Main/Germany, April 10, 2025 Music plays an important role in human emotions, social bonds and cultural interaction. But not everyone feels the same way. Why do some people enjoy music more than others, for example? ‘The answer to this question can give us an insight into more general aspects of the human mind – for example, how experiences become pleasures,’ explains first author Giacomo Bignardi from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. ‘We wanted to understand whether genetic differences between individuals lead to differences in music enjoyment and what these differences can tell us about musicality in general.’
To find out whether genetic factors influence music enjoyment or the perception of reward from music, the team used a research design comparing the similarity between identical and fraternal twins:
If identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, genetics probably plays a role. In collaboration with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, the researchers were able to utilise data from more than 9,000 twins, including information on the perception of reward through music and the ability to perceive musical characteristics such as pitch, melody and rhythm.
The results show that the ability to experience pleasure from music is partly inherited: Using the twin design, the researchers were able to determine that 54 per cent of the differences in the Swedish sample were genetic. The team also found that the genetic influences on the perception of musical reward are partly independent of musical perception skills and the general (non-musical) perception of reward. This means that differences in how rewarding we personally perceive musical enjoyment are also partly genetically determined and cannot be explained solely by individual differences in our general human reward system. In addition, the researchers discovered that different facets of music enjoyment are partly influenced by different genes, such as emotion regulation, dancing to the beat or making music with others.
„These results paint a complex picture. They show that our enjoyment of music does not depend exclusively on our ability to perceive musical sounds or to feel pleasure in general,“ reports senior author Miriam Mosing from the MPIEA. ‘Rather, it seems that there are specific genetic and environmental factors that influence our musical perception.’
While the present study is based on data from Swedish twins, the MPIEA, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, recently launched the first national twin register in Germany, called ‘Gertrud’. The aim of this initiative is to create a comprehensive resource in Germany for research into the interactions between genes and the environment that underlie individual differences. Twins who would like to contribute to scientific progress and participate in research studies are invited to register at (www.gertrud.info).
Original publication:
Bignardi, G., Wesseldijk, L. W., Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., Ullén, F., Fisher, S. E., & Mosing, M. A. (2025). Twin Modelling Reveals Partly Distinct Genetic Pathways to Music Enjoyment. Nature Communications. (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58123-8)
ImageSource
MPI für empirische Ästhetik / F. Bernoully, The ability to enjoy music is partly hereditary.