string drum

This week I stumbled across an unusual instrument I had never heard of before, so I need to obsess a bit about it and pile up a few links here.

So the story is I saw this piece in the Guardian how the Occitan language, which the central governments of France have tried to eradicate since the time of the troubadours, is today kept alive by a hardy bunch of folk musicians, including the band Cocanha (presumably the Occitan equivalent of French cocagne, as in pays de cocagne = paradise?). The picture in the Guardian showed members of Cocanha carrying this strange instrument:

hotlinked from the Guardian article

In this lovely video, you can see them playing the instrument - it is obviously a tuned percussion instrument which they beat with a stick:

I looked up their website but didn't get any answer except percussion. Finally, looking up the French Wikipedia entry of the group, I learned that it is a Tambourin à cordes or Tambourin de Bearn, in English also called a string drum. The strange shape is built so you can wedge it under the arm that plays a single-handed whistle (as in pipe and tabor) while beating it with the other arm. The English Wikipedia entry shows photos of how this is done.

PS Although I have seen performances in medieval Occitan, I wasn't quite aware that the language is still being spoken today, so that article brought two revelations at once. I understand that it is quite close to Catalan. I'm a bit confused about the terms Occitan, Provençal (made famous by the Nobel winning writer Frederic Mistral) and Franco-Provençal, but as the Edition L'harmattan doesn't seem to have the title "Occitan" in their fabulous series "Parlons ...", I assume that the title Parlons Provençal is actually about the same language. Separately, they also have a book called: L'occitan tel qu'on le parle (Occitan as it is spoken).