Résumé
Wood, the main building material of many musical instruments, affects their mechanical and acoustical behaviour. Different parts, instruments and organological families lend to a broad range of material requisites. Considering the lesser-studied instruments of geocultural ensembles other than Western “savant” music shows an even greater diversity of functions-chosen species. This diversity in used species is very little known, while instrument makers over the world are currently facing issues of availability and/or of conservation status of some of their preferred woods. Furthermore, comparable vibrational properties of woods including damping are scarce and highly scattered.We present here the creation of a new specific relational database conceived as a tool to gather and study these aspects. It contains three main parts. 1) Botanical species (Tree and wood information and conservation; links to uses and properties). 2) World instruments (with the different woody species used for each part). 3) Viscoelastic vibrational properties of wood. Data sources are: our own field and experimental work; literature survey including many hard-to-obtain, non-English-language sources. Up-to-date taxonomy is checked with widely accepted sources.Summary of data contained at present day: instruments =circa150; “instrument part/ used species” = c850; species with checked botany= more than 500; species used in instruments= c300; species with viscoelastic vibrational properties = c330 (covering about 5500 tests).Some possible analysis from this databank include: 1) Material variations for a given part of instrument; 2) cross-cultural comparison of material choice; 3) range of variation in vibrational properties for one single wood species, covering several researches; 4) pointing out lesser-known species as viable alternatives to threatened species; etc.Efforts must also be pursued on: vibrational characterization of wood diversity; collection of wood uses in worldwide instrument making cultures.