Wood is an essential material for the manufacture of musical instruments. Evaluating its acoustic qualities falls within the pooling of several fields of competence; the instrument maker brings a very invaluable empirical knowledge which allows the choice of the best species. In addition, knowledge in mechanics and anatomy of wood allows a better comprehension of the origin of these qualities. In parallel, research in musical synthesis associated with the problems of psychoacoustics elucidates the perceptive attributes, which make the acoustic quality of a given species. The study relates to sixty tropical wood species and is limited to the percussion instruments such as xylophone. Two classifications are carried out and put in parallel, that of the instrument maker and that given by the signal analysis, in order to identify the parameters of the signal and the wood anatomy which are determined from the point of view of the acoustic quality of material. (Texte intégral)