If you can’t sing, blame your genes

IF YOU sing so off-key that people run out of the room, you may have your parents to blame.

Perfect pitch – the ability to reproduce any musical note without prompt – may be determined by your genes as opposed to something you can learn, scientists have found.

Researchers at the University of Delaware in the US scanned the brains of 20 musicians with perfect pitch, 20 other musicians and 20 people with no musical training. They found a pitch-perfect musician’s auditory cortex – the part of the brain that processes sound – was about 50 per cent larger than normal.

But it was probably not enlarged by their training as the other musicians had the same size auditory cortex as the non-musicians.

Dr Keith Schneider said: ‘There does seem to be a genetic component. More research is needed but it could be the case that people are predisposed to have perfect pitch.’