You already know this, even if you've never thought about it.
Play a major chord and something inside you lifts. Play a minor chord and something sinks.
The question is: why? Is it learned? Is it cultural? Is it something in the physics of sound itself? The answer is all of these. And more interesting than you might expect.
Major and minor
The shortest version of the answer is: a major third sounds bright; a minor third sounds dark. The interval between two notes (measured in vibrations per second) has a feeling. The ratio of those vibrations is what your body responds to, before any words show up.
Studies show that even infants respond differently to major and minor tonalities. Babies look longer at speakers playing consonant intervals than dissonant ones. But culture matters too. In Klezmer, Flamenco, and various Middle Eastern and South Asian traditions, what we'd call "minor" doesn't mean sad. It means passionate, longing, ecstatic, devotional.
The body keeps tempo
There's a thing musicians know: when you drive, your speed creeps up to match whatever's on the stereo. The body wants to sync. A slow song slows your breathing; a fast one pulls your heart rate up by a couple of beats.
"Music is the only thing I know of that gets inside the body without being food."
A song you cannot forget
There's a song from the year I turned fifteen that I cannot listen to without crying. I'm not even sad when I hear it. I just leak. The brain stores songs differently than it stores most things. They get filed next to feelings, not facts.
Some sounds bypass thought entirely and speak directly to the nervous system. Film composers have known this for decades. Two notes, close together, can make your heart race before you understand why.
What I keep coming back to
Music is information about being human, encoded in a way the body can read directly. Not metaphorically. Literally: the air shakes, the eardrum moves, and somewhere downstream you feel something you don't have words for.
Music doesn't just reflect emotion. It teaches us what emotion can be.
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Why trying to do everything means doing nothing.