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Sound Waves are made up of two parts: Amplitude (Loudness) and Frequency (Pitch). When frequencies interact, you get interference. If the frequencies are whole number multiples of each other, you get harmonics which sound good. The octave is the distance between a note (the tonic) and the next harmonic of it, and this froms the basis of scales and key signatures. If the frequencies don’t have whole number ratios, fractions with small number tend to sound better than those with larger numbers.
Unfortunately, dividing up space in an octave is a fairly complex problem as you want to maximize the number of low number ratio between the tonic and the frequencies you choose to assign to notes in your scale. In Europe when the musical notation was being developed and standardized, various composers actually argued about how to do this. Bach even wrote several pieces of music design to sound “right” which the pitches he prefered and bad in those he did not.
There are actually several different ways to do this, leading to numerous different musical scale in different culture, all of which are valid. However, as a child, you get exposed to the versions used most commonly in your culture and you learn to hear those as normal and you learn the cultural signifiers assigned to them. This is why the European Major scale “sounds” happier and the Minor “sounds” sad, and why it sounds “wrong” when those pitches are used in different ways by other musical systems.
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