Organology, a branch of ethnomusicology, is the study of musical instruments and their classification. The first Western system–which classified instruments primarily as idiophones, membranophones, chordophones, or aerophones—was proposed by Sachs and von Hornbostel in 1914. This system has been the progenitor and inspiration for numerous other classification systems. While the van Hornbostel–Sachs system has proven to be useful in many contexts, it does not offer a consistent approach in terms of the transfer of energy from driver to generator to resonator. In addition, it does not take into account the common practice in modern popular and art music by which digitized samples of sounds are disembodied and appropriated from musical instruments from around the world. In other words, rather than encountering musical instruments as visual, tactile, and sound-producing, musicians and audiences encounter only pure sound. This paper, therefore, addresses two issues: How would a classification system of musical instrument {\sound} take into account the vibrational characteristics of acoustical musical instruments as well as the results of perceptual research on musical timbre from the past 40 years? The resulting system effectively turns Hornbostel–Sachs “on its ear” by reinterpreting primary classes as subclasses and vice versa.