This doesn’t make any sense to me, these are just sounds, they don’t sound neither happy nor sad to me (when I try playing them on piano). But I’m new to music so I don’t know… Is there an explanation that actually makes sense?
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It’s 100% cultural and very context dependent. Different cultures don’t always have the same associations, and even in western music you can have happy sounding minor chords and sad sounding major chords
One example is the phrygian mode, which had been considered very sad in western music for centuries, but is very common in happy traditional Jewish songs
Also within western music, there used to be the concept of [durum and molle](https://youtu.be/Fdj-WPCgD8c?si=-nx_x68zw-BtsDWv) (hard and soft) about 400 years ago, and major chords we considered more durum and harsh, while minor chords were more molle. That’s a big generalization too and it’s not always contradicting the happy/sad thing, but it’s a very different concept that sounds alien to us today. For example, a death in an early opera could be announced accompanied by major harmonies, which sounds a bit weird today because of the happy connotation, but it made a lot of sense back when it had a connotation of harshness (it’s probably also affected by the tuning of the instruments and singing back then, but this is a Reddit comment on ELI5)
All sounds / notes have a certain wavelength, the closer two wavelengths are to each other, the “cleaner” it sounds
A “major” third is more in harmony than a “minor” third. Which is why old rock songs with distorted amps often use major chords, cuz they sound cleaner and thus “happier”
Chords like the triad sound “out of tune” because it’s as far from in harmony as you can get.
TLDR; minor chords are slightly more out of tune than a major chord.
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