There’s a centuries-old toy noisemaker, popular in Peru, which consists of a rawhide membrane bound tightly over the large end of a frustrum-shaped section of gourd.
A waxed cord is knotted though a hole through the center of the membrane, which the player grips tightly with thumb and forefingers, and then slides his fingers along the cord, vibrating the membrane.
With a little practice, it makes a noise rather like a squawking chicken, and is often sold as a “chicken drum.”
It’s the lineal ancestor of the greeting cards that play a tune by dragging a thumbnail along a ridged plastic strip attached to a cardboard-card diaphragm.
It’s a very small conceptual leap from using your fingers to vibrate a drum diaphragm by pulling on a cord, to attaching that cord to another diaphragm to see if you can vibrate it that way.
And I’d bet dollars to donuts it was used exactly the same way that tin-can versions are used today: as a toy to amuse children.
