Steal This Idea: Combination Vape/Musical Instrument

By: Tony

Vaping tends to get a very bad rap. The vape community at large has a similar vibe to a lot of other subcultures that rely on group support, as most of society finds vaping obnoxious. I’ll be the first to admit that people need hobbies, I just don’t think this hobby is as constructive as, say, building wicker furniture, or painting birdhouses. There is a lot of technical know-how and crafting/constructing that goes into vaping and I feel it might be better-suited when applied to just about anything else besides making a machine and turns oil into good-tasting clouds.

That being said, here’s an idea to run with: a vape that doubles as a musical instrument.

Feel free to take the idea and run with it, maybe give a shout out to your good friends here at Trashcollective when you blast through your Kickstarter goals. The concept is that while inhaling (or exhaling or both), the user could make a tune and change the pitch by pressing different keys. This could have any number of applications and possibilities, so try and stay with me.

It could be modeled after various instruments.

It could be modeled to look and sound like an ocarina, a recorder, an oboe, or numerous fictional musical instruments from fantasy and sci-fi. The vape clouds billowing out of it would only add to the aesthetic. There has to be a market intersection between people who vape, and people who like having objects that are functional pop-culture references. Both groups love to spend money on their interests, so it is effectively an untapped market. When someone uses one, the music emanating from the vape/instrument is, in essence, free advertising.

My thought on the basic construction would be something akin to a meldica. I don’t have an engineering degree or much of a firm grasp on the inner-workings of a melodica, but both melodicas and vapes utilize airflow, so it stands to reason that they would not be difficult to combine. A quick google search tells me that a melodica can sell for relatively cheap, so tinkering with one and connecting it to a vape for a conceptual prototype might not be too expensive.

Melodicas are also annoying.

However, melodicas are annoying in a funny way. They can take a song or tune and make it sound cheap and flat, and it never fails to get laughs.

For instance, here’s the Jurassic Park Theme on melodica. It gets me every time. I’m going to take a break from writing this to go and watch it for a while.

Ok, I’m back.

The vape nation tends to take their hobby way too seriously, like people who trick out Honda Civics so they can Go Real Fast. It would be good to take a step back and get people to laugh with you, instead of at you. This vape/musical instrument has the potential to empower those of the vaping world, so that they can control the mass of memes about how ridiculous and needlessly pretentious and ultimately asinine their interest is. No, please, continue explaining your custom hand-constructed heating coil, I’m only feigning that I’m feigning interest.

So far, the only real positive side to vaping I’ve found is that it doesn’t generate a ton of waste, like smoking cigarettes does. It can also make you smell like greasy cotton candy, if you’re into that sort of thing. This might add to the annoyance, but in a new and interesting way, so steal this idea.