Dead Mouse Synth & Trash-Built Amp: Instruments From E-Waste
Ruixiang H
TBD
This demo table invites you to play music on electronic waste. The first instrument is an old wireless mouse converted into a synthesizer: its left-click, right-click, and scroll wheel — designed for productivity — are rewired as triggers and controls for a tone-generating circuit packed back inside the original shell. What was a pointing device becomes a tactile noise-maker that fits in your palm.
The second is a working guitar amplifier built around an LM386 chip, with nearly all of its passive components harvested from salvaged circuit boards and its speaker driver rescued from a non-functioning Bluetooth speaker (the driver was fine; only the battery and amp board had died). It lives in a cardboard shipping-box enclosure — reuse all the way down. Plug in a guitar and it drives the salvaged speaker with audible, controllable volume; the sound is rough and gloriously lo-fi, exactly what you’d expect from an LM386 and a pile of e-waste.
The table is hands-on. Visitors can click and scroll the mouse-synth to make sound, plug into the amp, and dig through the component-harvesting process with me — how to desolder and test parts from dead boards, what’s worth saving, and how "material thinking" turns trash into instruments. I’m happy to talk circuits, salvage strategy, and the surprising musicality of broken hardware.