How much of human emotional response to music is learned vs. natural?

like for example, if played a song that has a "sad" melody, do we learn to have the "right" response i.e be sad or do we know that naturally?

theoretically, if you had a human being who grew up never been exposed to music, would they have a sad response to a "sad" melody?

I would love to hear what y'all think, this thought has been bothering me for the past week or so

part of this thought was inspired a while ago by Adam Neely's video about music theory and white supremacy

music theory varies significantly across cultures (Adam uses the example of North Indian music theory)

so to follow on that, it would make sense that if cultures have their own ways of theorizing music, that they would have different emotional responses to various music structures and concepts

so I'm leaning more towards learned/informed emotional response than natural

idk anything about music theory myself, I just listen to a lot of music

so I end up thinking a lot about why something sounds good/bad/interesting/weird etc. to me

I feel like learning music theory (not just Western music theory) would help me articulate those thoughts better

a couple people mentioned the concept of minor keys being "sad" and the thing is I don't know what minor (or major) keys are

but if you played a song with a lot of minor keys I would probably go "oh you mean the sad music"

my sister had a similar reaction to watching some sad scene in a TV show and they start playing some sad music in the background, she went "there goes the sad music again"

watched "Understanding The Black Parade" by 12tone ( thanks to @balrogboogie for sharing this )

and that was a very good video, I'm listening to "Welcome to the Black Parade" atm to appreciate it

( pretty sure I've not heard this song before but it feels familiar for some reason, maybe it was in some movie or TV show? )

laughing at the comments:

"Every time a single G is played on a piano, an emo sheds a tear"

wait I remember where I heard this track before, it was in @guerrillarain 's "Guide to Emo" playlist !!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/32WNhsKsH7jyQqLHIbBauZ

Misery Business by Paramore is a personal favourite of mine

fitting that a thread about emotional response to music would end up with me listening to a playlist of emo music

ah yesss Evancescence's Bring Me To Life

WAKE ME UP INSIDEEEEEEE

love to read a Wikipedia page about a music genre and learn about genre gatekeeping/elitism that went on:

"Nu metal received criticism from many fans of heavy metal and nu metal was often labeled with pejorative words like "mallcore". Many heavy metal fans refused to consider nu metal a true subgenre of heavy metal."

and just like in hiphop when certain people argue whether certain forms/subgenres belong under the umbrella genre with pejoratives...its very cringe

I'm reading about nu metal because I was reading about Linkin Park's Meteora which for some reason I thought was considered a emo album

...then I remembered the term nu metal exists

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu_metal#Criticism_and_controversy

hmm I see I see, all of this seems familiar