Studying the diversity of Central African harps

International audience The harp is found in all Central Africa, where the greatest diversity and variability of this musical instrument are to be found, in terms of shapes, uses, functions and the societies which play them. These are oral tradition societies, which means very little is known about their history and, thus, about harp history. This study is firstly a state of play of the descriptions and attempts of classifications of the harps in Central Africa. Indeed, several studies described the distribution of the vernacular names of the harp across Central Africa, the distribution of the types and localisations of the anthropomorphic sculptures, or the kind of harps found in one region or one country. Secondly, it aims to explain the creation process of more than 450 parameters, for the description of the morphology, the context of use and the vernacular vocabulary associated to the constituent parts of the harp. These parameters have been defined and elaborated in order to obtain an objective, exhaustive and systematic description for this musical instrument, which has never been done before. As part of the Kundi and Ngombi projects, both led by Sylvie Le Bomin, more than 500 harps have been described between 2016 and 2021 in European and African museums, in private collections and on the field in Gabon and Cameroon. This dataset is the cornerstone of statistical and phylogenetic analyses, which will allow a global understanding of the Central African harps, their diversity and variability, their history and their evolution as .