
Bol Processor is a program initiated by Bernard Bel for music composition and improvisation with real-time MIDI, MIDI file, Csound, and text output options. The earliest implementation of Bol Processor (BP1) on an Apple IIc computer dating back to 1981, was used by Jim Kippen for modelling compositional/improvisational processes by drum players in North India.
Bol Processor produces music with a set of rules (a compositional grammar) or from text scores that can be typed in or captured from a MIDI instrument. These rule sets are very similar to the formal grammars (context-free, context-sensitive, etc.) used in computer science to define machine-readable languages.
As a compositional tool, Bol Processor (BP2) has been successful at modelling music of many styles including Western classical music, serial music, contemporary art music including minimalism, and Indian classical music. After the implementation of its Csound interface, BP2 won the Bourges 1997 international award (ex aequo with Cecilia) in the category of computer-aided composition and realization software.
Bol Processor had begun as a shareware application for Macintosh computers developed by Bernard Bel and Srikumar Karaikudi Subramanian. In the Spring of 2006, Anthony Kozar joined the venture and open-sourced the Bol Processor with the hope that a community of developers will come together to port it to other platforms and continue to enhance its facilities for music-making. Porting BP2 to Mac OS X was finished in June 2007 by Anthony Kozar.
Bol Processor BP3 introduces new features owing to its association with Csound. Essential domains of musicology bearing relevance to computer music are addressed on this site, among which the issue of microtonality applied to just intonation in Western harmony and the intonation of ragas in Hindustani music.
➡ Versions of BP2 are available for both Mac OS X and Mac OS 7-9
➡ Check Bol Processor ‘BP3’ with its PHP interface
As an open source project hosted by Sourceforge and GitHub, we are taking Bol Processor into the next stage of its evolution. We also hope that BP3 will become more modular, separating its computational engines for musical grammars, polymetric expressions, and its powerful time-setting algorithms into software libraries that may be incorporated into other open source software.
Please join the BP users help forum , BP open discussion forum and/or the BP developers list to stay in touch with work progress and discussions of related theoretical issues.
Bernard Bel & Anthony Kozar
➡ Visit the growing sets of examples and tutorials on this site!
➡ Download a PowerPoint slideshow introducing the Bol Processor with sound examples (zip file, 150 Mb)
➡ YouTube video: “Bol Processor - 39 years!”
➡ Join our project on GitHub!
➡ All file releases for this project