Tips for using Bela
From artist and researcher Till Bovermann
Till Bovermann has put a series of tips and tricks for using Bela on his website that cover topics such as connecting bela to wifi, SuperCollider and interfacing with hardware.
Based in Berlin, Till Bovermann is a reseacher and artist whose work touches upon instrument design, tangible and auditory interaction and the meeting place of the physical and the digital. Till was one of our supporters during the Kickstarter campaign and since then has been making great use of Bela for all sorts of interesting projects. In this post we want to bring your attention to his work and to a great set of tips and tricks for working with Bela that Till has compiled on his website. These include pointers for using wifi with Bela, many useful tips on using SuperCollider with Bela, as well as guides for connecting Bela to particular hardware like rotary encoders and capacitive sensing.
Till was one of principal investigators of the project 3DMIN — Design, Development and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments, a collaboration between UdK Berlin and TU Berlin that brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers and artists to work on questions regarding historical and contemporary electronic musical instruments. As part of this project Till participated in our workshop at STEIM in 2016. At the workshop we explored the potential of porting PushPull, a digital accordion-like instrument created as part of the 3DMIN project, to Bela. On the 3DMIN github you can find one of the most detailed and well-documented guides for this instrument that exists in the musical instrument building community. Below is a video of the instrument in action (note that this version is not running on Bela).
You can find out much more about Till’s work and research on his website TAI Studio but before that we’d like to bring your attention to one of our favourite projects built with Bela, which uses the board to create an aeolian articial plant that can only be found in the remotest reaches of Finland: Anemos Sonore Maaum Siilium. This project was created with Katharina Hauke as part of 2016 Hai Art / SOCCOS micro-residency on SONIC WILD{ER}NESS, Hailuoto, Finland.
If you have projects created with Bela that you’d like to share on our blog get in touch with us via Facebook, Twitter or our Forum.
