I asked this a long time ago here and didn’t get an answer. Prompted by Exceptions to the rule: "On the Dope: For every possible question there is a person…, I’m going to ask again.
I went to Tonga sometime in the 1990s and was privileged to attend a small island church that was in mourning. The congregation sung a lot and well. The hymns were traditional western hymns but the singing was not. The harmonising was somehow distinctively Polynesian - to my ears, “brighter” at the upper middle and top.
A few years later I visited Taiwan. I went to the middle of the island to see the spectacular sights along the cross-island highway. The bus full of economists stopped at a hotel and we walked off. But somewhere in the hotel there was a choir singing. And it was the same as in Tonga. Startlingly so. I stood there gawping in the car park at the singing coming from a building for some time.
It looks like Polynesians come from Taiwan. I understand that. And I understand that a distinctive style of singing could well have survived the travel to distant lands and the adoption of new religions. But what I don’t understand is what makes the style of singing so distinctive. I don’t think it is chord voicing. I think it’s temperament. I just don’t know what it is.