Katharina Buczek
Have you ever been to a concert where the crowd clapped painfully off-beat? What about at a wedding or bar, where people are dancing as if they have two left feet.
Most humans are capable of keeping time to different beats. But, there are also people who do not have the same rhythmic abilities.
Researchers from around the globe began to wonder why and came together to perform a massive genetic inquiry.
So, after recruiting over six hundred thousand volunteers, the team launched their study.
The participants were first asked a self-assessment question: “Can you clap in time with a musical beat?” Surprisingly, a little over ninety-one percent of the group believed they could.
Afterward, the research team had the group participate in numerous beat-measuring experiments.
One included tapping a piano key to the beat of four different songs, where participants’ accuracy was measured using REPP– an “online-based technology that precisely measures the asynchrony of taps along to music clips.”
Following the beat assessment, the scientists then performed a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) in order to ascertain which loci are linked to keeping time.
The researchers discovered that there are sixty-nine genes associated with beat synchronization. And these genes differed between people who could tap a beat on time as compared to people who could not.
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