Sure, a lot of people like music. But some people feel like they must eat, sleep, and breathe music in a way that surpasses their more casual listening counterparts. Considering how subjective music is, determining why some people see music as a life force, and others have a “take it or leave it” attitude, can be easier said than done.
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However, a study published in Nature Communications suggests that there’s a genetic reason behind why some people have to have music and others can go full days, weeks, or even months without actively seeking out music to listen to. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Netherlands), MPI for Empirical Aesthetics (Germany), and the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) partnered to figure out what makes music so important—or unimportant—to people.
As it turns out, your intense love of music that seemingly outpaces everyone around you isn’t in your head. It’s in your DNA.
How Scientists Determined a Genetic Link to Loving Music
Any good experiment needs a control and a variable, which makes a study like the one published in Nature Communications in March 2025 so difficult. For one thing, music is entirely subjective. Who’s to say what a real music lover looks like? Furthermore, testing for links between genetic material and external phenomena can become murky quickly. For the researchers on this particular study, they made good use of the old adage, “two heads are better than one.”
Scientists enlisted the help of just over 9,000 fraternal and identical twins. Based on this population’s unique genetic structure, scientists can reasonably determine if a certain trait, behavior, or other characteristic is genetic if it is shared by identical twins but not fraternal. Using the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire as the basis for their questions, researchers began collecting data from the twins.
This data included music reward sensitivity, or how good someone feels after listening to their favorite tunes. Scientists also measured general musicality—namely, perception of pitch, melody, and rhythm—and general reward sensitivity, the latter describing how easily someone experiences pleasure.
Data analysis revealed an estimated 54% of the music-loving variabilities collected from the study participants had to do with DNA. The team also determined that music reward sensitivity is not necessarily dependent on general reward sensitivity or musicality.
Why Does Knowing That Loving Music Is Genetic Matters?
According to study author and PhD candidate Giacomo Bignardi, “The answer to this big question has the potential to open a window into more general aspects of the human mind, such as how experiences become pleasurable. We wanted to understand whether genetic differences between individuals can result in differences in the pleasure that people derive from music and what these differences can tell us about human musicality in general,” per ScienceDaily.
“These findings suggest a complex picture in which partly distinct DNA differences contribute to different aspects of music enjoyment,” Bignardi continued. “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 [Charles] Darwin the most, and which still baffles us today.”
So, the next time you say, “music is in my blood,” to explain your deeply rooted passion for all things musical, you can know that you’re at least 54% right. Happy listening, music lovers.
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