Initially I thought it could just be cultural/emotional association, and that the emotions invoked are just learned and reinforced by experiences and culture. However, I noticed that music from a completely different culture that is completely novel to my ear still invokes the same emotions within me as it does with the native listeners. Furthermore, I noticed that music seems to have the same effect on very young toddlers as it does on adults, which seems to invalidate my theory that it’s just cultural and emotional association. So please ELI5.
This is a multi-disciplinary subject in which the details are tricky to put into ELI5. But in a nutshell, you're confusing "emotions" with "feeling states" which are two different things.
Musical notes and intervals, chords, etc are perceived similarly across a bunch of different cultures in terms of their "feeling states"/sensations if they use the same tuning systems. (however, different cultures use different systems than what western cultures use). "Emotions" are created by a combination of precursor "feeling states" combined with culture and learned associations of different emotional labels that different cultures would agree/disagree what constitutes as "happy," "sad," "fear," etc. Two different cultures might label the sound of a major chord or tritone interval as different emotions, but the underlying sensations are felt as similar, just as the raw sensory input of hearing a specific frequency range or seeing a specific colour are similar.
The brain has evolved to detect different ratios of frequencies interacting with each other and throughout evolution, brains that further processed those musical phenomenon into strongly felt feeling states had survival benefits when it comes to emotional communication and "belonging to the tribe," and were more likely to pass on their genes through blind natural selection, and also favoured sexual selection (music creating emotions, and emotions leading to shared experiences among humans which leads to greater chances of arousal in close proximity, and further leads to more mating). Brains that didn't evolve to be affected by music weren't as likely to be selected in population growth as the species, which is why people with genetic differences in difficulty processing music are the exception and not the norm. Variety of different types of disorders and phenomenon: https://www.oliversacks.com/oliver-sacks-books/musicophilia-oliver-sacks/
Music and language as biological adaptations with measurable and identifiable neuronal structures in the brain (that develop from birth independent of cultural exposure) are highly likely to have co-evolved with each other: https://www.howmusicreallyworks.com/chapter-one-music-evolution-natural-selection/what-music-biological-adaptation.html
Further reading with resources and citations: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1khpa64/comment/mr8p9p6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Culture may be completely different but musically it might have been inspired by western music(judging by thats what you are accustomed to). A lot of contemporary music that the non-western part of the world is listening to is western inspired, music-wise (sadly in my opinion).
A completely different music system would probably hit you as “out of tune” or “weird” when listened to first time by you.
Also a possibility is the other way round, that to some degree some genre in Western music was inspired by a non-western culture. I'm not aware of any specific examples, but I know that vague "Cultural-sounding" music when refering to a foriegn place is not uncommon in Western media
there is a big part of how music affects us that is innate and not culturally influenced. It's just how the human brain perceives it
Music emotion is absolutely culturally influenced. While most people would consider music in minor key to be sad and major key to sound happy, some cultures have it reversed.
There are lot more factors that determine if music is happy or sad rather than just major or minor quality of chords or keys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMWszWYX2OQ
Often it's context combined with tempo, timbre, lyrical content, and performance dynamics