Genetic factors and shared environment contribute equally to objective singing ability

Singing ability is a complex human skill influenced by genetic and environmental factors, the relative contributions of which remain unknown. Currently, genetically informative studies using objective measures of singing ability across a range of tasks are limited. We administered a validated online singing tool to measure performance across three everyday singing tasks in Australian twins (n = 1189) to explore the relative genetic and environmental influences on singing ability. We derived a reproducible phenotypic index for singing ability across five performance measures of pitch and interval accuracy. Using this index we found moderate heritability of singing ability (h(2) = 40.7%) with a striking, similar contribution from shared environmental factors (c(2) = 37.1%). Childhood singing in the family home and being surrounded by music early in life both significantly predicted the phenotypic index. Taken together, these findings show that singing ability is equally influenced by genetic and shared environmental factors.