> have a really hard time with the idea that it could be cultural

I played in a gamelan ensemble in college. The music was completely foreign. A piece that sounded like a funeral procession was played at weddings. I have a hard time believing the arrangement of music is not cultural - or, at least partially culturally bound.

Yeah, that's really getting to the heart of why the idea of a totally objective theory of music seems legit. Major/minor doesn't exist in a vacuum, there's a lot of other signifiers in the music that are highly correlated. It's not just the major triad, it's the energy of the beat, playing, singing, the bright instruments. If you were a 2 year old and just heard a major chord played on a piano, then a minor chord, then you probably wouldn't get "happy" or "sad" from it. Maybe by 3 or 4 you've already picked up the correlation between "happy music" and "major triad". You pick this stuff up really quick and it's part of your core memories/mental model, so it can feel inherent. It's like the fish that doesn't know what water is.

I've been working with some people building a music model from scratch and it really surprises me how much correlation there is across different features. It's been difficult applying that to general sound effects, because music is highly correlated in ways more general sound isn't.