Chinese music sounds pretty recognisably Chinese - I can't see why mack/mis should express surprsie at the fact it's pretty "melodic" - Chinese is a language where tone in speaking is a key element.

Listening to speech when it's very faint, or distorted, so that you can't pick out any words, it's normally very easy to identify what language is being spoken pretty accurately, and even what variety of te langauge. For exmaple it's easy enough to picks out English from French, but it is also easy to pick out North American English from either - it isn't a question of vocabulary as such. And I have a feeling that if you tried the same experiement with some fluent Irish speakers, in Irish and in English, it might be quite hard to spot whiuch language they were actually speaking.

I don't imagine this is by any means the only factor in shaping music, but it has to be one of them.