These Hackers Are Turning Dead Vapes Into Musical Synthesizers

Vapes are bad for your assemblage and decidedly atrocious for the planet; the world’s landfills are stuffed with disposable vape cartridges. But present there’s a mode to springiness each that e-waste a much pleasant tune.

The Vape Synth is simply a task created by a radical of makers successful New York City who interruption isolated spent Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers and hack them into integer philharmonic instruments. The resulting instrumentality inactive looks similar a vape cartridge, but with a tiny talker nestled amid an array of lights and buttons. To play it, you enactment your rima connected it and gully your enactment inward, similar you would connected a vape.

Think of it similar a integer ocarina. The Vape Synth repurposes the vaporizer's existing low-pressure sensor. By sucking upwind done the sensor—maybe it's a reverse integer ocarina—you trigger an oscillator circuit and make an audio signal. Pressing the buttons triggers antithetic tones. The noises that travel retired are, frankly, screechy and chaotic. (This is what it sounds like.)

The radical who made the Vape Synth cognize it sounds goofy. That’s the point.

“We started from a precise silly place,” says Kari Love, 1 of Vape Synth’s creators. “We person to usage the debased unit sensor. Which means to play it, you indispensable suck.”

Love and David Rios are professors astatine New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Shuang Cai is simply a PhD pupil astatine Cornell University and teaches astatine NYU and Cornell. They are each self-described salvage hoarders and makers who enactment connected the Vape Synth task nether the moniker Paper Bag Team. (None of them vape nicotine.)

The 3 person presented the Vape Synth successful talks similar the Open Hardware Summit and tally workshops to physique them astatine events similar the 2025 Low Tech Electronics Faire. Another store was held this past play astatine the hacker corporate NYC Resistor successful Brooklyn. The squad besides conscionable released a thorough usher via Instructables connected however to hack your precise ain vapes into synths.

“They're this immense e-waste product,” Love says of spent vapes. “You spot them everywhere. They person the lithium ion batteries, which makes them peculiarly insidious successful the disposable tech world.”

When Juul, erstwhile the king of vapes, was ordered by the FDA to propulsion its merchandise from US markets, it cleared the mode for other—entirely disposable—vape devices to flood the shelves. The already multi-billion-dollar vape concern exploded, with devices pouring successful from countries similar China and birthing dozens of brands with names similar SoundCloud rap opus titles. (Pillow Talk, Hyppe Bar, PolkaDot, Puff Bar.)