Creators on Bela Gem

The new Bela Gem presents creators with an expanded set of creative possibilities. Improvements in speed, embeddability, audio quality and a fully redesigned IDE mean both previously unrealisable ideas can become reality while older ones can be improved and expanded. This is why we reached out to members of the Bela creators community during the campaign to reflect on the existing relationship between Bela and their creative practice, and how Gem’s new possibilities will shape their future projects.

Here we compile each of their short videos together to paint a picture of how the variegated needs of creators are facilitated by the Bela platform, contrasting the needs and perspectives of instrument designers, educators, composers, visual artists, researchers and more.

Lauren Sarah Hayes

Improviser, composer, and academic Lauren Sarah Hayes has spent over a decade exploring embodied approaches to electronic music. A longtime Bela user, she designs tactile, body-centric systems that make sound something you feel as much as hear.

Lauren is Associate Professor at Arizona State University and founder of PARIESA, a research group focused on enactive sonic arts. Her work spans experimental pop, noise, and free improv—and she’s performed at festivals like Moogfest, hcmf//, and ISCM World New Music Days.

Yann Seznec

Yann Seznec is a sound artist and researcher based in Stockholm, Sweden. His work explores constraints-based design, experimental music, and sustainability, often through handmade audio devices that are deliberately limited in function, revealing new ways to play, perform, and listen.

A longtime Bela user, Yann is currently completing a PhD at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where he’s investigating how constraint-driven tools can shape sonic practice. Before moving to Stockholm, he spent many years in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he worked as a freelance artist and performer, and founded Lucky Frame, a creative studio for experimental video games and sound tools. From 2019 to 2021, he was Game Designer in Residence at MICA in Baltimore.

Rafaele Andrade

Originally from Brazil and currently based in the Netherlands, Rafaele’s practice employs a heady mix of live coding, open source approaches and instrument design. The latter is what first brought her to Bela, which she eventually used to create Knurl, a 16-string cello running SuperCollider at its core. It’s rotating design offers the musician access to four different groups of strings simultaneously, while embedded DSP expands both sonic and compositional possibilities into new realms.

Alberto Novello

Alberto Novello (aka JesterN) is a physicist, composer, and analog media artist who explores the connection between light and sound. Trained in nuclear physics, psychoacoustics, and electronic music, he builds performances using oscilloscopes, video mixers, and laser projectors to create real-time audiovisual works.

His concept of visual listening invites audiences to experience sound and image as a single, fused signal. He’s released music on Hive Mind Records, Staalplaat, and Creative Sources, and his work has been shown at Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, and Museo Reina Sofía.

Marylou Sharrock

Marylou  Sharrock is a musician, singer, sound artist, and DIY electronics designer. Her work simultaneously explores the processes underpinning nature and the steady vanishing of its sound world. By drawing connections between crumbling ecosystems and faded electronics, she comments both on biodiversity’s plight and the powerful implications of its natural systems recurring in different forms in the greater human experience. She has placed particular focus on birdsong and custom-built hardware, creating responsive biosynthetic instruments.