These hackers are turning dead e-cigarettes into music synthesizers

E-cigarettes are bad For your body and definitely bad for the planet; The world’s landfills are full of disposable vape cartridges. But now there’s a way to put a little more fun into all that electronic waste.

Vape Synth is a project created by a group of makers in New York City who disassemble disposable Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers and turn them into digital musical instruments. The resulting device still looks like a vape cartridge, but with a small speaker nestled amid a cluster of lights and buttons. To turn it on, you have to put your mouth on it and draw your breath in, as you would in a vape.

Think of it like a digital ocarina. Vape Synth reuses the low pressure sensor found in the atomizer. By absorbing the wind through the sensor, this may act as reflects Digital Ocarina – You operate an oscillator circuit and generate an audio signal. Pressing the buttons causes different tones to appear. The sounds that come out are, frankly, loud and chaotic. (This is what it looks like.)

The people who made the Vape Synth know that it looks goofy. This is the point.

“We started from a very silly place,” says Carrie Love, one of the creators of Vape Synth. “We have to use a low pressure sensor. That means if it turns on, it must be bad.”

Love and David Rios are professors in the Interactive Communications Program at New York University. Shuang Kai is a doctoral student at Cornell University and teaches at New York University and Cornell. They’re all self-described hoarders and rescue product makers who work on the Vape Synth Project under the moniker The Paper Bag Team. (None of them use nicotine.)

The three have presented the Vape Synth at talks like the Open Hardware Summit and run workshops building it at events like the 2025 Low Tech Electronics Faire. Another workshop was held last weekend at the hacker group NYC Resistor in Brooklyn. The team has also released a comprehensive guide via Instructables on how to hack your own vapes and turn them into blends.

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

Vape Synths are handcrafted with speakers, buttons, and optical resistors on top. There is a circuit board inside each, and the design uses the battery found in the vape and the low pressure sensor.

Photo: Calvin Lyon

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered Juul, once the king of e-cigarettes, to withdraw its product from U.S. markets, it paved the way for other e-cigarette devices — which are entirely disposable — to flood shelves. The multi-billion-dollar e-cigarette business has already exploded, with an influx of devices from countries like China and the birth of dozens of brands with names like the titles of SoundCloud rap songs. (Pillow Talk, Hyppe Bar, PolkaDot, Puff Bar.)