Bela
Queen Mary University of London
Problem
Bela was born out of music research that took place in the Augmented Instruments Lab at Queen Mary University of London, directed by Andrew McPherson. Through the process of creating digital musical instruments that feel as responsive and natural as their acoustic equivalents, McPherson and colleagues failed to find a self-contained system that was not only small enough to embed, able to connect to analog sensors and digital devices, and powerful enough to process audio, but also fast enough to process audio and sensor input with the ultra-low latency that musical interaction demands.
Solution
Bela is an open-source embedded computing platform for creating responsive, real-time interactive systems with audio and sensors. Bela supports digital creators of all kinds, including musicians and digital audio enthusiasts. High-performance computing makes natural, beautiful interaction for artworks and innovative products possible, and Bela has focused on making this kind of physical computing accessible by removing major barriers. Bela supports multiple coding languages, so creators can code in the way that makes sense to them; Bela offers a browser-based IDE, replacing complicated toolchains with an interface that loads in a browser and is loaded with tools to help creators make beautiful interaction.
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Tabletop R&D
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