Victor-Charles Mahillon, (born March 10, 1841, Brussels—died June 17, 1924, St. Jean, close to Cap-Ferrat, Belgium), Belgian musical scholar who collected, described, and copied musical devices and wrote on acoustics and different topics.
In 1865 Mahillon entered the instrument-manufacturing agency established by his father, Charles Mahillon. He additionally based a music journal, L’Echo musical (1869–86). As curator of the Brussels Conservatoire museum (from 1879), he fashioned a group of greater than 1,500 historic, fashionable, and non-Western devices. His analytical catalog of the gathering (1880–1922 in 5 vol.; reprinted 1978 in 2 vol.) comprises demonstrations of theories of instrument development and a classification of devices based mostly on the fabric that produces the sound (e.g., a drum is assessed as a membranophone). This classification was later adopted and expanded by Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs and has turn into probably the most generally accepted system of instrument classification. He additionally made copies of uncommon devices, notably the Bach trumpet, and arranged live shows of music performed on previous devices. Mahillon printed Les Éléments d’acoustique musicale et instrumentale (1874; rev. ed. 1984; “Elements of Musical and Instrumental Acoustics”) in addition to quite a few monographs, and he additionally contributed articles to the ninth version of the Encyclopædia Britannica.