Several years ago, I watched a documentary musical, Latcho Drom , about the migration of the Romany people from India to Egypt, Turkey, Romania Hungary, Slovakia, France and Spain. The beautiful transition of music as the central theme of their cultural migration is sketched in my mind. Recent studies in genetics also point to genetic similarity that shows the same migration pattern.

The other interesting correlation is between musical ability and genetics. There are some people who seem to have an inbuilt musical ability. Like wealth, music has been carefully preserved and proliferates in certain families; in the gharanas of the Hindustani music tradition, such as Patiala, Agra, Gwalior and Jaipur, for instance. Interestingly, in the Carnatic tradition, many of the musicians are brahmins. This shows that genes have a possible impact at two levels: on musical ability and the kind of music that one takes to.

Your kind of music

In the 1970s, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a geneticist at Stanford University in California, argued that combining genetics with fields such as linguistics and demography could help trace human ancestry. Floyd Reed, a population geneticist at the University of Maryland in College Park, worked on this further. He first crunched the existing catalogues to convert the cantometric database into a two-dimensional scatter plot, with each dot representing a culture. The closeness of the dots showed their similarity in music. He found that the music of African bushmen cultures, such as the Juhoansi, fell close to that of pygmy tribes such as the Aka. And in this plot he found that groups such as the Hutu were farther away and they sing in unison.

When Floyd compared the graph with a database of genotypes from more than 3,000 people in Africa, he found a correlation between genes and songs. In other words, cultures that had grouped together musically tended to share genetic markers.

Making links The link was stronger than the correlation between songs and geography: cultures next door to each other weren’t as likely to sing the same tunes as were cultures with similar genotypes. Music reveals deeper biological connections between people than characteristics such as language, that change when one culture meets another.

Moving to inherent musical abilities, Miriam Mosing of the Karolinska Institute, Sweden, suggests that practising music without the right genes to back up that practice is indeed useless. To prove this she took a fairly large sample size of 1,211 pairs of identical twins (who share all their genes) and 1,358 pairs of fraternal twins (who share half) born between 1959 and 1985 and concluded that genes have a profound effect on their musical ability.

So which genes have been found to affect musical ability? It seems like the best association was found at chromosome 3 close to the GATA2 gene that regulates the development of cochlear hair cells and the inferior colliculus (IC) in the auditory pathway. The best linkage results were obtained on chromosome 4 that contains several genes that affect inner ear development and are expressed in amydala or hippocampus. The highest probability of linkage was obtained for pitch perception accuracy next to the protocadherin 7 gene, PCDH7 known to be expressed in cochlear and amygdaloid complexes.

Music is ingrained and while it may be true that some of us have the talent, others can enjoy listening to it. Given my love for music, it is possible that I could have done well had I bothered to practice. Perhaps, it is not too late.

The writer is CEO Mapmygenome.in

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