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Vapes are bad for your body and definitely not good for the planet; the world’s landfills filled with disposable vape cartridges. But now there is a way to give all that e-waste a nicer tone.
The Vape Synth a project created by a group of makers in New York City that dismantles spent Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers and hacks them into digital musical instruments. The resulting device still looks like a vape cartridge, but with a small speaker nestled among a number of lights and buttons. To play it, you put your mouth on it and put your breath in, just like you would a vape.
Think of it like a digital one ocarina. The Vape Synth repurposes the vaporizer’s existing low-pressure sensor. By sucking air through the sensor—it might be a overturn digital ocarina—you trigger an oscillator circuit and generate an audio signal. Pressing the buttons will trigger different tones. The noises that come out are, frankly, loud and chaotic. (This is what it sounds like.)
The people who made the Vape Synth knew it sounded crazy. That’s the point.
“We started from a crazy place,” says Kari Love, one of the creators of Vape Synth. “We have to use the low pressure sensor. Which means to play it, you have to suck.”
Love and David Rios are professors in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Shuang Cai is a PhD student at Cornell University and teaches at NYU and Cornell. They are all self-described salvage hoarders and makers working on the Vape Synth project under the moniker Paper Bag Team. (None of them vape nicotine.)
The trio presents the Vape Synth at speeches such as the Open Hardware Summit and run workshops to build them in events like 2025 Low Tech Electronics Faire. Another workshop was held this past week by the hacker collective NYC Resistor in Brooklyn. The team has just released a full guide by Instructions how to hack your own vapes with synths.
“They’re a huge e-waste product,” Love said of spent vapes. “You see them everywhere. They have lithium ion batteries, which makes them very insidious in the technological world.”
When Juul, once the king of vapes, was ordered by the FDA to pull its product from the US markets, it cleared the way for other—completely disposable—vape devices to flood the shelves. The already multi-billion-dollar vape business exploded, with devices pouring on from countries like China and gave birth to many brands with names like SoundCloud rap song titles. (Pillow Talk, Hyppe Bar, PolkaDot, Puff Bar.)
