Sachs-Hornbostel system

System devised by the German-born musicologist Curt Sachs and the Austrian scholar Eric von Hornbostel, which has become one of the most widely-utilized systems for classifying musical instruments. The Sachs-Hornbostel System uses a systematic but basic taxonomic method to classify every instrument as belonging to a particular group or ‘class’, according to the nature of the vibrating agent that produces sound.

Based on an earlier system devised by Victor Mahillon when he classified the instrument collection at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, the Sachs-Hornbostel System accommodates all instruments and allows museum curators, for example, to classify and arrange musical objects without knowledge of their music, culture, or origin. The four main classes in the system are aerophones, idiophones, membranophones, and chordophones. A further main class – electrophones – was subsequently added. Each of these classes is further sub-divided through a series of more detailed descriptors. Each class of instrument has a number, the numbering system being derived from the Dewey system of library classification.