These Hackers Are Turning Dead Vapes Into Musical Synthesizers

Vapes are bad for your body and definitely bad for the planet; the world’s landfills are stuffed with disposable vape cartridges. But now there’s a way to give all that e-waste a more pleasant tune.

The Vape Synth is a project created by a group of makers in New York City who break apart spent Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers and hack them into digital musical instruments. The resulting device still looks like a vape cartridge, but with a small speaker nestled amid an array of lights and buttons. To play it, you put your mouth on it and draw your breath inward, like you would on a vape.

Think of it like a digital ocarina. The Vape Synth repurposes the vaporizer’s existing low-pressure sensor. By sucking wind through the sensor—maybe it’s a reverse digital ocarina—you trigger an oscillator circuit and generate an audio signal. Pressing the buttons triggers different tones. The noises that come out are, frankly, screechy and chaotic. (This is what it sounds like.)

The people who made the Vape Synth know it sounds goofy. That’s the point.

“We started from a very silly place,” says Kari Love, one of Vape Synth’s creators. “We have to use the low pressure sensor. Which means to play it, you must suck.”

Love and David Rios are professors at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. Shuang Cai is a PhD student at Cornell University and teaches at NYU and Cornell. They are all self-described salvage hoarders and makers who work on the Vape Synth project under the moniker Paper Bag Team. (None of them vape nicotine.)

The three have presented the Vape Synth in talks like the Open Hardware Summit and run workshops to build them at events like the 2025 Low Tech Electronics Faire. Another workshop was held this past weekend at the hacker collective NYC Resistor in Brooklyn. The team also just released a thorough guide via Instructables on how to hack your very own vapes into synths.

“They’re this huge e-waste product,” Love says of spent vapes. “You see them everywhere. They have the lithium ion batteries, which makes them particularly insidious in the disposable tech world.”

Handmade Vape Synths with speakers, buttons, and photoresistors on top. There’s a circuit board inside each, and the design utilizes the vape’s existing battery and low pressure sensor.

Photograph: Calvin Leon

When Juul, once the king of vapes, was ordered by the FDA to pull its product from US markets, it cleared the way for other—entirely disposable—vape devices to flood the shelves. The already multi-billion-dollar vape business exploded, with devices pouring in from countries like China and birthing dozens of brands with names like SoundCloud rap song titles. (Pillow Talk, Hyppe Bar, PolkaDot, Puff Bar.)