Organology (from Ancient Greek ὄργανον (organon) 'instrument' and λόγος (logos), 'the study of') is the science of musical instruments and their classifications.
There is a degree of overlap between organology, ethnomusicology (being subsets of musicology) and the branch of the science of acoustics devoted to musical instruments.
[3] One update to the system was made by Sachs in 1940 through the addition of a 5th category-electrophones, a category encompassing instruments which produce music electronically.
[5] The book is primarily divided into four chronological periods of instruments- early instruments, antiquity, the middle ages, and the modern occident.
[6] Andre Schaeffner introduced a system based on state-of-matter of the sound-producing mechanism, giving rise to two top-level categories: solid (containing strings and percussion), and gas (containing woodwind and brass).
[7] With the invention of hydraulophone, the physics-based organology has been expanded to use solid, liquid, and gas, wherein the top-level category is the state-of-matter of the material that makes the sound.
[21] She states that “these branches are independent in theory, but in practice, research and processes conducted with and on instruments and their sounds continuously flow between them and permeate the whole.”[22] Another notable paper on the topic of the connection between ethnomusicology and organology was written by Henry M. Johnson and published in 1995 in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford.
It is important to study the object not necessarily for the sake of categorization or understanding the way that it is played or how it works but the meaning that it holds for the musician and the audience.