**These Hackers Are Turning Dead Vapes Into Musical Synthesizers**

The world's landfills are overflowing with disposable vape cartridges, but a group of innovative makers in New York City has come up with a creative solution. Meet the Vape Synth, a project that transforms spent Elf Bar nicotine vaporizers into digital musical instruments.

Imagine putting your mouth on a small speaker and triggering an oscillator circuit by sucking wind through it – essentially like playing a reverse digital ocarina. This is what the Vape Synth sounds like. The resulting device still resembles a vape cartridge, but with a small speaker nestled among lights and buttons. To play it, you simply draw your breath inward, just as you would on a vape.

The Vape Synth repurposes the vaporizer's existing low-pressure sensor, which is used to generate an audio signal when triggered by suction. Pressing the buttons produces different tones. While the sounds may be screechy and chaotic at first, that's precisely the point. The team behind the project intentionally aimed for a goofy sound.

"We started from a very silly place," says Kari Love, one of the Vape Synth creators. "We have to use the low-pressure sensor. Which means to play it, you must suck." Love and her colleagues, David Rios and Shuang Cai, are all self-described salvage hoarders and makers who work together as the Paper Bag Team under this moniker.

The team has presented their innovative project at various events, including the Open Hardware Summit and the Low Tech Electronics Faire. They also offer workshops to build Vape Synths from scratch. In fact, they just released a comprehensive guide on how to hack your own vapes into synths via Instructables.

"They're this huge e-waste product," Love comments about spent vapes. "You see them everywhere. They have the lithium-ion batteries, which makes them particularly insidious in the disposable tech world." The Paper Bag Team is passionate about diverting waste from landfills and encouraging people to find creative ways to reuse and recycle their electronic waste.

The Vape Synth's tonal quality may not be perfect, but that hasn't stopped the team from working on an improved version. They're already experimenting with a wider musical range and incorporating MIDI controllers to produce more pleasing sounds.

Rios emphasizes that people should feel empowered to repurpose their electronics. "People feel just completely unempowered to do anything," he says. "Even the most basic thing of just popping the lid open to see what's in there. You don't even have to touch it. It can be fun and easy, and you can hopefully apply that to your other e-waste or at least get interested."

The Paper Bag Team is committed to spreading awareness about electronic waste and encouraging people to find innovative ways to reuse and recycle their disposable devices. As Cai puts it, "The idea is not that we want to use this as a solution to the existing status quo, but to use this to call for attention and encourage more creative action on these kinds of issues."