Musical aptitude

Hereditary basis of musical aptitude and creativity has been strongly suspected at least since the days of Bach family, which in eight generations produced over twenty eminent musicians. Analysis of such complex trait poses numerous problems, however. Not the least of them is having everyone agree on a definition of the phenotype. One such approach measures aptitude by Karma Music Test KMT (Heritability 46%) and Carl Seashore's subtests of pitch SP (Heritability 68%) and time discrimination ST (Heritability 21%) as well as their combination COMB (Heritability 60%).

The study [PMID 24614497] identifies 28+ SNP's "maybe" linked to musical aptitude, but doesn't give the associated alleles or magnitude, making the data at this point mostly useful for tracking heredity. The presentation of the results is perhaps little unusual, though it's in a series of incremental studies on the subject. To avoid filling SNPedia with related SNP's as most of the associations seem fairly tenuous, the less associated ones are listed here. The probabilities are in posterior probability of linkage (PPL) or posterior probability of LD (PPLD) for regions. See the actual study and supplementary materials for details.

SNP's:

rs4630083 (In LD rs4291455) 0.70 KMT

rs9854612 (In LD rs7433900 rs6769565 rs9819395 rs7629705 rs7635061 rs2335050) 0.78 SP

rs13146789 (In LD rs13109270) 0.81 COMB

rs2961694 (In LD rs7729341) 0.61 KMT

rs2186739 0.58 KMT

Regions (possible genosets):

4p14–13 0.86 SP - rs4349633 0.07 KMT

4p12–q12 0.50 COMB - rs11732997 0.28 COMB rs2412501 0.34 COMB

16q21–22.1 0.57 KMT - rs7188225 0.08 KMT

18q12.3–21.1 0.55 COMB - rs617459 0.07 SP

22q11.1–.21 0.68 COMB - rs4819640 0.11 KMT

Singleton SNP's (may be noise):

rs17048992 0.55 COMB

rs1351143 0.20 COMB

rs339078 0.20 SP

rs11792889 0.33 KMT

rs10852545 0.22 KMT

rs7292049 0.28 SP

rs7052828 0.94 KMT

Not listing pedigree-wise linkage SNP's as the sample set for those is quite small per pedigree. There is also a specific haplotype probability table centered on rs3803.

[PMID 16205790] AVPR1A and SLC6A4 gene polymorphisms are associated with creative dance performance

[PMID 18424507] Genome-wide linkage scan for loci of musical aptitude in Finnish families: evidence for a major locus at 4q22

[PMID 19461995] Musical aptitude is associated with AVPR1A-haplotypes

[PMID 19576568] Genome-wide study of families with absolute pitch reveals linkage to 8q24.21 and locus heterogeneity

[PMID 21307861] Association of the arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (AVPR1A) haplotypes with listening to music

[PMID 22384070] AVPR1A and SLC6A4 polymorphisms in choral singers and non-musicians: a gene association study

[PMID 23118445] Comprehensive genomic analyses associate UGT8 variants with musical ability in a Mongolian population

[PMID 23460800] Genome-wide copy number variation analysis in extended families and unrelated individuals characterized for musical aptitude and creativity in music