Music Hackspace Bela/SuperCollider Workshop

Bela is designed to generate and process audio while connected to the physical world using all sorts of analog and digital sensors.

During the workshop we will show how you can adapt your existing SuperCollider-based instrument to the Bela platform. Also we will show how you can go from developing and testing by executing your code interactively, to a fixed setup where your code runs automatically at startup of the Bela to create an embedded instrument.

For this workshop you will need to bring a laptop. We will provide Bela kits to use during the workshop, which can be purchased after the workshop. Of course, if you already have a Bela kit, then you can bring that too to use during the workshop.

What do I need to know?
We will assume you have a basic familiarity with SuperCollider. If you are a complete novice, make sure you go through some of the Supercollider tutorial pages ahead of the workshop, in order to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts.
No previous knowledege of Bela is required for this workshop.

What do I need to bring?
a set of headphones (with a 3.5mm connector)
Bring your own laptop. Mac OS, Linux, Windows (7 upwards) are all fine. Versions 10.11.1 to 10.11.4 of Mac OS X have known problems with the drivers for the board, so they should upgrade to 10.11.5 at least.
Make sure you have one USB host port available on your computer (yes, MacBook users: bring your collection of adapters!)
Make sure you have the SuperCollider IDE and Google Chrome installed.

Bela is an embedded system for real-time audio processing with ultra-low latency. Based on the BeagleBone Black single-board computer and featuring a custom hardware and software environment, Bela integrates audio processing and sensor connectivity in a single high-performance package. Bela is an ideal platform for musicians, instrument designers, audio enthusiasts and interactive artists.

SuperCollider is a powerful, open-source, cross-platform, audio engine and programming language, used not only to create music, but also for machine learning, audio/music reactive installations, performance, interactive systems, research, live-coding and much more.

The venue is located on the ground floor of Somerset House and is fully wheelchair accessible with an accessible toilet. If you have any other access requirements, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

If you have any questions about this event or any of our workshops please contact workshops@musichackspace.org.