This roundtable addresses pedagogical questions concerning teaching organology as part of general college education. How can ethnomusicologists make the study of musical instruments relevant to the broad undergraduate audience? How can we make these objects, often detached from our students’ world, come alive in the 21^st century college classroom? How can we invite students to think more deeply and critically about various ethnomusicological issues and societal problems through creative engagement? How might these practices contribute to efforts for decolonizing and democratizing ethnomusicology, organology, and music education in general? We explore these pedagogical questions by sharing experimental approaches incorporating creative “fabrication” practices such as imaginative instrument designing, worldbuilding, and storytelling into a research project. The panel includes four undergraduate students who recently took a course entitled “Encapsulating Sounds: Introduction to Critical Organology”, their instructor, and an ethnomusicologist colleague from another institution as a respondent. The instructor will outline the “Imaginative Instrument Design” assignment given to the students as their final research project, the assignment’s specific curricular context, and pedagogical goals. Each student will share their research project and talk about their experiences of using creative tools for critical inquiry and their renewed understanding of what constitutes musical instruments. In addition to introducing our experiments, the panel, joined by the outsider respondent and audience members, will reflect on the accomplishments and limitations of such an experimental project, including ways the assignments can be made useful in other types of institutions and settings.