Austronesian-speaking peoples spread across Taiwan, insular Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Madagascar, making the realm of the Austronesian language family “the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansion of the past five centuries,” as linguist Robert Blust pointed out (2019). While music is a prominent art form among Austronesian-speaking peoples, it has been largely overlooked in comparative studies of Austronesian cultures, and Austronesian music has never become a central subject of musicological inquiry. Under the framework of area studies, the musics of Austronesian-speaking peoples are often divided into Oceanic and Southeast Asian musics. Such a division downplays the diversity of musical traditions within Southeast Asia and Oceania and overlooks cultural and musical connections among Austronesian-speaking peoples across these regions. To address the limitations of the area studies framework, I coin the term Australism to refer to a pan-Austronesian framework that brings together research on Southeast Asian music and Oceanic music. Based on my studies of Taiwanese Indigenous chants, I propose a “PERC” model to examine how the components of “parallelism,” “exchange,” “ritual,” and “chant/dance” interrelate in manifesting Austronesian linguistic, musical, and cultural characteristics. I argue that this model may facilitate consideration of cultural connections among Austronesian-speaking peoples and bridge diverse case studies on Austronesian musics, thereby fostering and advancing Australism as an evolving academic discipline.

This paper explores how identity, resistance, and adaptation are negotiated through Indigenous Amis music and dance, historically shaped by a heterosexual binary ontology and increasingly reconfigured within postcolonial Taiwanese contexts and queer engagements with women’s agency. During the Japanese colonial period and under enduring Han Chinese patriarchal norms, maternal Amis traditions were transformed through political suppression, cultural assimilation, and religious conversion. A corollary of these processes was the shift in heritage transmission—language, surnames, land, and property—toward patrilineal inheritance, reinforcing male dominance and constraining women’s agency within contemporary Amis society.

Against this backdrop of gendered restructuring, the paper asks how women cultural bearers negotiate and reinterpret, or converge with and diverge from, dualistic gender values through music-making today. Drawing on Jodie Taylor’s concept of the “intimate insider” (2011), I reflect on friendships formed during fieldwork since 2019 in the Amis communities of Falangaw and Ciwkangan. These relationships reveal the complex role of (pro-)LGBTQ+ male allies—often influential in local music scenes—in facilitating women’s cultural participation and reshaping gendered musicking (Small, 1999) and performative spaces (Butler, 1990).

This analysis applies Indigenous feminist and decolonial frameworks to address Thomas R. Hilder’s call for deeper engagement with Indigenous feminism and cosmology (2016), while critically examining how musicking may intersect with nationalist identity protocols questioned by Roderick A. Ferguson (2004). Finally, I reflect on my positionality as a Han Chinese ethnomusicologist collaborating with younger Amis generations, foregrounding dialogic knowledge-making and avoiding appropriative representation (Robinson, 2020).

Building on earlier discussions of computational approaches to music analysis, recent developments in artificial intelligence invite renewed reflection on how technologies reshape listening and musical knowledge. Drawing on Thomas Porcello’s concept of techoustemology (2004), this study examines how AI-assisted analysis reconfigures modes of listening, analytical practice, and knowledge production in the study of historical recordings, taking Taiwanese Hakka shangezi folksongs from commercially published recordings of the 1960s as a case study. Using AI-assisted tools for vocal–instrument separation, pitch contour extraction, and phoneme-level alignment, the study conducts a detailed examination of singers’ pronunciation and melodic realization at the syllabic level. While shangezi performance is conventionally expected to adhere to a standardized Sixian-accented Hakka, close analysis reveals that individual singers frequently depart from such prescriptive linguistic norms. Variations in consonant and vowel articulation, as well as tonal realization, suggest a more fluid and multilingual vocal practice than the ideal of linguistic purity implies. Rather than presenting AI as a neutral analytical instrument, this study foregrounds how the technical requirements of segmentation and alignment intensify critical listening and detailed transcription. The analytical process does not automatically determine dialectal variation; instead, it creates conditions under which discrepancies between normative expectations and embodied performance become perceptible. AI-assisted analysis is thus proposed not as a replacement for ethnomusicological interpretation, but as a reflexive techoustemological method—one that recognizes technology as constitutive of how we hear, analyze, and understand historical performance practice.

In this paper, I discuss debates surrounding amplification of ritual dance musics, showing how amplification modifies sensibilities produced by dance. I focus on malikoda, a dance genre practiced by ‘amis / Pangcah, one of Taiwan’s 16 recognized Indigenous groups. During annual rituals, ‘amis communities organize the dance spiral along distinctions between hosts and guests, gender differences, and age grade precedence in ways that compel dancers to feel the endurance of ‘amis sovereignty as embedded in the age set system. Whether malikoda should be amplified is an open question. Debates about amplification often focus on ti’eciw, the call section of malikoda tunes. Generally, responsibility for ti’eciw mirrors age set precedence, with elders and other community leaders singing the call and passing this responsibility downward to younger groups. Amplification enables a single singer to lead incredibly large groups of dancers; combined with prerecorded tracks, it may even obviate human callers. In contrast, without amplification entire age sets may perform the call; and dancers must rely on kinaesthetic prompts to coordinate the dance, developing listening habits attuned to this kinaesthetic sense. Yet those on both sides of the amplification argument formed their arguments by linking aesthetic qualities of the dance to the dance’s social effects, including intra-age set rapport and inter-age set mobilization. Amplification restructures relationships among senses, attenuating some social effects while facilitating others. Moving beyond notions of technologies as offering specific affordances, I employ the metaphor of attenuation to consider relationships among technology, kinaesthetic sense, and sovereign sensibility.