Play the white keys from C and it's sunny; start the same seven notes from A and it's sad; from B, unstable. One scale, seven starting points, seven whole moods — ordered brightest to darkest. Tap a mode to hear it climb, slide the root, and listen to the light drain out.
The seven diatonic modes are the same major scale started on each of its degrees — so they share every note but rearrange the steps (tones and semitones), and the position of the semitones is what makes the mood. Tap a mode and the page plays its scale live over a root you set. They're stacked here in true brightness order — Lydian (one sharpened note) down to Locrian (a flattened fifth, no stable home) — the ordering by how many degrees are raised vs. the natural minor. Real modal theory, played, no recordings.
'Brightness' and the mood words (bright, sunny, tense…) are the standard but subjective characterisations of the modes; the felt colour of a mode also depends on harmony, register and context, not the scale alone. The interval patterns, the shared-notes fact and the brightness ordering (by raised degrees) are exact and sounded live.