Weird thought on tastes and music and art

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I've it hit me a few times - for paintings I really love David Coulter's rainy day paintings of Manchester, I love classic UK drum and bass.... I have Norman English genes in me by my last name and the castle with my family name is a couple counties south of the Scottish border.

Admittedly my actual heredity is all over the place - Engligh, Irish, Slovak, Polish, etc. and mostly eastern European but... it's just funny that I'd live in the US, be freakishly outsider in some of these regards (here in the US if you don't like this very minute's top 20 or top 40, at least when I was growing up, you're a freak - not a difficult line to cross).

It does make me wonder if there's some genetics / epigenetics to this stuff.

Yeahyeahyeah, I know, it's dubious speculation without a lot of data points. Curious to see if anyone else has noticed this kind of thing (whether there is a P greater than random chance or whether I can just get a massive selection bias of answers from this question so I can feel like I'm right ). Maybe a pole can help me beat back my confirmation bias a bit.

Technically I'd have to answer this poll as somewhere between 'Yeah, there's a lot of overlap' and 'Some overlap'.

Nope - not really, sorry.

I like Latin music because my parents met through a dance class, so growing up I heard a lot of Latin music. My mum especially likes to play Latin. So it feels familiar to me. However, I have no genetic ties.

Sometimes I like to listen to songs in German. I learnt a bit of German at school, so out of curiosity I like to listen to see how much I understand. My understanding of German only extends to basic conversation. I've also played video games in German because I thought it might be a fun challenge. There's technically a very distant connection there, but it's so distant that I don't think it counts.

Elle Me Dit remains one of my favourite songs in French. I've heard the English version, but personally I prefer how it sounds in the original. Chances are I've probably absolutely butchered this song in my attempts to sing along. I do have a bit of Anglo-French ancestry. However, we are talking distant again. Far less distant than the German ties though. Still fairly distant. I don't think I could really claim it as counting without gaining some eyerolls.

Somewhat interestingly, there was a song used as a lullaby in my family. For a while, I was left wondering what the song was because the lyrics had become fragmented since most were singing based on fuzzy childhood memories of a song not quite remembered. When it got to me, I had the melody and a couple of sentences. It bugged me, not knowing, so I decided to search for the song. Fortunately, I was able to find it! The song is When Irish eyes are smiling (1912).

https://americansongwriter.com/behind-t ... 20at%20all

I don't have any American ties, however I am 1/8th Irish.

Mentioned songs in this post:

I do think that there's something to this. I think genetics probably does have an effect on these things but it's going to be so different for everyone that I doubt there's any way of establishing which effects derive from where, or if certain tastes have anything to do with genetics in a particular person. For some it might and for some it might not.

I don't really know much about music in the places of my heredity, so I can't really say. I am very into poetry and folklore though, and I have Welsh and Irish ancestry - peoples well known for their oral traditions, but I've no idea if that's because it's made it's way down the line to me. I suppose there's no way of knowing, though I do think it's probably true that more can be conferred via genes than we tend to think, including perhaps things like a natural preference or appreciation for the kinds of art or music that were central to cultures one is a descendant of.

This isn't really related because it isn't genetic but thinking about this made me realise/remember that when my mother was pregnant with me my father apparently used to play his guitar for me, and my mother used to sing. To this day my favourite kinds of music by far are melodic guitar playing, and the kind of singing done by female vocalists. Very specific, which makes me think that's why they're my favourites.

Heavy metal rock seems to be the common taste among Aspies, although it's the only music I can't stand.

Heavy metal's a weird one to place because a lot of people would say it's roots are in jazz and blues and bunch of white guys from the UK and US in the 70's and 80's electrified it.

On one level I feel like drum and bass should be as weird a category because it's a lot of jazz and reggae ideas, essentially kicked off by Fabio and Grooverider putting hip hop breaks over dance music back in the early 90's, but it became it's own thing and of the directions it took the most popular seemed to load up on these dark explorations of horse hooves on cobblestones (the 'Apache' break has that element - like in Digital's Metro), sort of a gritty factories and black smoke mid 19th century thing, mixed with Dr. Who, Aliens / Geiger style dark futurism, etc..

They're sort of sibling genres IMHO and yet some strong similarities, some sharp differences (hold up something like Metallica's Master of Puppets against Dillinja's Armoured D or Rufige Kru's Dark Metal).

Around St. Patrick's day my dad plays Irish albums constantly - Irish Eyes are Smiling, The Wearing of the Green, Danny Boy, etc. I don't mind it but yeah, once a year's enough. If anything I do have some Pavlovian programming with that - ie. when I hear Irish music I can taste the corned beef and cabbage that's around the corner.

I mostly like hard rock