Factors affecting pitch discrimination performance in a cohort of extensively phenotyped healthy volunteers.
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 articleSubject
HumansAcoustic 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
Surveys and Questionnaires
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/22333Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1038/s41598-017-16526-8Publication 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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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
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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