Ami tribe  Click here to listen to songs -	1."Welcome a Friend"
	2."Harvest Song"

    The Ami, with a population of about 131,845 is the largest tribe, and live along the Pacific coast of Hualien Prefecture and Taitung Prefecture. The Ami is matriarchal, mainly engaged in fishing and farming. They live in the plains and build many communal halls.

The Ami had early contact with Chinese, and is regarded as the more advanced in culture and in economy among the ten tribes of Taiwan aborigines.

    Ami tribal songs are most colorful and rich, with several outstanding characteristics:
(1) Most of the songs, especially almost all the songs for groups, are without lyrics, and only use some  sounds with no meaning. Thus, s song regarded as a love song in one village might be sung as a working song in another village.
(2) Their basic scale is pentatonic, and the descending modes ending on A and C are most popular. However, sometimes F and B are added to form transitory septatonic modes.
(3) The singing styles are of great variety: homophonic melodious style, lead and reponsorial style, and polyphonic free contrapuntal style are common; sometimes cannon style and drone-bass style are used.
(4) Lead & responsorial singings are often used for harvest and festival songs. The melody of leading parts transforms each time, and have lyrics and nominating sounds, but the responding parts usually repeat a fixed melody, with only short nominating sounds.
(5) Their free contrapuntal singings start from the leading part, gradually overlapped by other parts, reaching to four parts. Usually the leading parts is sung by colorature-tenor with a rhythmical falsetto.
(6) The solo of melodic folk song style is extremely complete, especially the beautiful, soft vocalization of soprano-naturale has no peers in other tribes, although there might have been some Chinese or Japanese influences.