Marimba

The marimba is pitch percussion instrument. It consists of wooden bars that create tonal sounds when hitting them with mallets The origin of the Marimba is very controversial. Everyone seems to be in agreement that the marimba was first created with a hole in the ground, wooden bars laid across and someone hit the bars with a stick. The hole acted as the resonator. In the research of the time periods before Christ and ancient civilizations, art work can be found showing keyboard type percussion instruments According to certain scholars, the marimba migrated to Africa from southeast Asia. A director, Celso Lara Figueroa, of the University of San Carlos believes the it came from Indochina. However, others believe its historical
There are several distinct differences between the two; The way the bars are tuned, the marimba reads the written pitch as the xylophone is one octave higher, xylophone bars are thicker and marimba bars are made of a softer wood. Marimbas are also larger in size and have a deeper darker sound.
Two scholars, Marcus and Jones, believed that the xylophone migrated to Africa during the fourteenth century. Xylophones are not found throughout Africa. In fact, they are not found in Northern Africa. Though the marimba can comparatively be described as a low pitched xylophone, the argument is that culturally the backgrounds of these two instruments are different.
Some evidence supports that the xylophone originated in the thirteenth century in what is today known as Mali. In fact, of the word marimba has its origin of the word mbila, a Congo basin region language. As this pitch percussion instrument was adopted in Latin America they used calabashes as resonators which was similarly used throughout the Congo and Tanzania in Central Africa. The Africans made calabashes from dried gourds of the calabash