I do want to address your comment, Renaissance Man, regarding “the idea that certain harmonic combinations are innately appealing to the average human being.”

I think that’s a pretty serious overstatement. Many non-Western musical traditions either have very different concepts of how harmony works, or eschew functional harmony altogether. Even when that’s not the case, the music is often distinct enough to make such generalizations impossible; Indian classical music, for example, uses scales that don’t fit our system of equal-tempered semitones, so it’s not possible for us to use the same chords in the first place.

At best, one could argue for the universality of certain harmonic progressions in the Western tradition, but even that would be difficult to prove. There are tons of people who don’t care for rickrolling or roborolling music, I’m sad to say. :-)