The Bela Story
The evolution of Bela
Bela was founded in 2016, spinning out from the Augmented Instruments Lab at Queen Mary University of London. Since then, the growing team has evolved the Bela family of products and created a worldwide community of makers.
At Bela we care deeply about creating the best tools for crafting interaction with sensors and sound. This is our evolution, from our laboratory beginnings to the present day.
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From research project to maker platformBela started in a research group, and in 2016 the Bela team formed and brought Bela to the world via crowdfunding. Bela was born. Bela on Kickstarter
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Growing a communityAs we began to develop Bela we found an enthusiastic and lively worldwide community of musicians, artists, hackers and makers that understood what low latency had to offer them. We responded by creating resources such as the Bela Forum and Bela Blog to act as points of gathering. The Bela Forum
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The Bela shopAfter a successful crowdfunding campaign we opened the Bela Shop, to make Bela available worldwide. The Bela Shop
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Introducing Bela MiniWhen BeagleBoard's Pocket Beagle came out, we took the opportunity to take all the most popular features of Bela, and reduce them into a powerful system with a tiny footprint. The result was the enduringly popular Bela Mini. Bela Mini
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Trill touch sensorsWe had noticed that there was a lack of good options for capacitive touch sensing on the market, so in 2019 we debuted the Trill family of touch sensors. There are now six different Trills, each with a unique combination of form factor, sensing, and application. Explore Trill Touch sensors
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The Bela Youtube courseIn response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Andrew McPherson put a course online so anyone could learn about digital audio programming with C++ using Bela. This is a masters-level course that he developed, and is available for everyone for free on YouTube. The Bela course on YouTube
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Gliss touch controllerStarting in 2022 we began developing a touch control module for Eurorack using the technology behind the Trill touch sensors. Gliss was funded on Crowd Supply in 2022, and in 2023 it was made available worldwide. Gliss, touch control for modular synth
Want to get in touch with the team? We would love to hear from you! Please visit our contact page.
