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Factors affecting pitch discrimination performance in a cohort of extensively phenotyped healthy volunteers.

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Date
2017-11-28
Authors
Smith, Lauren M
Bartholomew, Alex J
Burnham, Lauren E
Tillmann, Barbara
Cirulli, Elizabeth T
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Abstract
Despite efforts to characterize the different aspects of musical abilities in humans, many elements of this complex area remain unknown. Musical abilities are known to be associated with factors like intelligence, training, and sex, but a comprehensive evaluation of the simultaneous impact of multiple factors has not yet been performed. Here, we assessed 918 healthy volunteers for pitch discrimination abilities-their ability to tell two tones close in pitch apart. We identified the minimal threshold that the participants could detect, and we found that better performance was associated with higher intelligence, East Asian ancestry, male sex, younger age, formal music training-especially before age 6-and English as the native language. All these factors remained significant when controlling for the others, with general intelligence, musical training, and male sex having the biggest impacts. We also performed a small GWAS and gene-based collapsing analysis, identifying no significant associations. Future genetic studies of musical abilities should involve large sample sizes and an unbiased genome-wide approach, with the factors highlighted here included as important covariates.
Type
Journal article
Subject
Humans
Acoustic Stimulation
Reproducibility of Results
Cognition
Pitch Perception
Pitch Discrimination
Music
Adolescent
Adult
Aged
Aged, 80 and over
Middle Aged
Female
Male
Young Adult
Genetic Association Studies
Healthy Volunteers
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22333
Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/s41598-017-16526-8
Publication Info
Smith, Lauren M; Bartholomew, Alex J; Burnham, Lauren E; Tillmann, Barbara; & Cirulli, Elizabeth T (2017). Factors affecting pitch discrimination performance in a cohort of extensively phenotyped healthy volunteers. Scientific reports, 7(1). pp. 16480. 10.1038/s41598-017-16526-8. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22333.
This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Scholars@Duke

Smith

Lauren Smith

Research Assistant, Ph D Student
I am interested in the principles and evolution of gene network oscillators. I study the life cycle rhythm of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and the evolution of yeast cell cycle networks.
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