[underlipton]

Music even more so. It's said that common emotional responses to certain features of music are culturally-mediated, but it's also weird how consistently certain features tend to elicit certain emotions. There could be a physiological basis, but that conflicts with the aforementioned, and anyway, it's not as consistent as, say, a reflex.

If I may succumb to romance for a moment:

"And a song someone sings, once upon a December."

Song as figurative memetic psychopomp, an automatic but not autonomic function to transmit ideas.