Check out this link.  This is a marimba made in the style of an African Xylophone, made for Evilyn Glennie.  Really, Really cool

http://www.users.waitrose.com/~ecnf/marimba/built.html

Well unfortunately when I went to check it out, the pics didn't show up.

FYI ... if you want to get a normal marimba to sound like this type of instrument, try placing strips of wax paper on the bars or over the resonators. I used to do this in college when I need the sound and didn't have the instrument. Guatemalan marimbas sound this way. Traditional, the buzz was created by such things as spider's web stretched across the gourd resonator.

Felix, what exactly is that last gourd supposed to be?  lol  A little frightening in my book.  

He would, and he does.    

It looks like fun to play.  I wish I could get my hands on it to give it a test run.

(Hey, Bart, that reminds me:  what was the name of that African xylophone that Victor Feldman played on the intro to "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"?  It wasn't a balafon, it was something else...dam-it...Victor Feldman was just too hip...)

BTW, speaking of non-Western mallet instruments...my favorite all time percussion instrument is from Javanese gamelan music - a metallophone called (IIRC) a "gender" (pronounced "gen-DAIR", with the "g" pronounced hard like in the word "guess").  I had the chance to play one briefly in the gamelan at my old University, and the best way I can describe it is, it was like playing silk.

Since I'll probably never have the $$ or the space in my house for my own gamelan orchestra, I'm relegated to being really bourgeois and triggering gamelan samples on my mallet synth...yes, I'm saving my pennies for the Roland "Asia" expansion board...