DRUM WITH SLIT
Rep. Dem. Congo
Idiophone

This instrument is certainly the ancestor of the real drum. It is simply a trunk of wood, originally cylindrical without even the slit, to be beaten with sticks of varying sizes. The founding father of African drums does not belong to the membranophones like almost all drums, but to percussion idiophones: this drum does not have taut membranes of hides to beat. We are in the presence of a hollowed out cylinder of wood, beaten with two sticks (at times of rough wood) ending in a coating of pitch and rubber (a piece of an inner tyre tube cut into strips). Different sounds are obtained by beating the drum in the centre rather than on the sides, towards the edges. Drums of this kind were used (at least according to the accounts of the first explorers) to transmit messages over a distance (hence the term "TAM TAM"), thanks to a sort of elementary alphabet of conventional signals. The drums with a slit are present in various areas of black Africa, in particular in forest areas. They can reach very considerable sizes (and be played by several musicians) but the commonest are not much larger than the one on display.