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Bol Processor 2 (BP2) is a program by Bernard Bel for music composition and improvisation with real-time MIDI, MIDI file, Csound, and text output options. BP2 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.) that are used in computer science to define machine-readable languages. As a compositional tool, Bol Processor has been successful at modeling music of many styles including Western classical music, serial music, contemporary art music including minimalism, and Indian classical music. BP2 won the Bourges 1997 international award (ex aequo with Cecilia) in the category of computer-aided composition and realization software.

Bol Processor 2 began as a shareware application for Macintosh computers developed by Bernard Bel and Srikumar Karaikudi Subramanian. The original Bol Processor program was developed by Bernard Bel and Jim Kippen on an Apple IIc. In the Spring of 2006, BP2 was open-sourced with the hope that a community of developers will come together to port it to other platforms and continue to enhance BP2's facilities for music-making. Porting to MacOS X was finished in June 2007 by Bernard Bel and Anthony Kozar. BP2 is currently available for both MacOS X and MacOS 7-9.

As an open source project hosted by Sourceforge, we are taking Bol Processor into the next stage of its evolution. "Bol Processor 3" is in the planning stages and is expected to run on more platforms and to add new capabilities for communication with other computer music software. We also hope that BP3 will be 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.

News

June 26, 2007: Bol Processor 2.9.6 released

Bol Processor 2.9.6 has been released! This is the first stable release of BP2 for MacOS X. BP 2.9.6 also runs on MacOS 7-9. All users are encouraged to upgrade as there have been many improvements. Read the release notes or download it below. For an introduction to the capabilities of BP2, please see Bol Processor introduction. For help using this release, see the help forum. For general discussion of BP2, check out the BP forum.

June 26, 2007: New Bol Processor Documentation project

A new collaborative space for documenting BP2 has been created on the CRDO website. The primary goal is to create a new up-to-date manual but it will also serve to collect feedback, examples, and tips from BP2 users. Everyone is welcome to contribute!

May 3, 2007: Academic presentations

Bernard will soon be presenting aspects of Bol Processor in several academic venues:

• A poster at the conference "Language and Music as Cognitive Systems", 11-13 May 2007, Cambridge (UK). Download the poster (a 20MB PDF file).
• Seminar: "The Bol Processor project: Rule-based representation of music" on 14 May 2007 at the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems Group, Centre for Cognition, Computation & Culture, Department of Computing, Goldsmiths' College, University of London (UK)
• Keynote lecture by Bernard Bel in the 4th international Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity, 17-19 June 2007, Goldsmiths' College, University of London (UK)

News archive...

Resources

Information and files

• Bol Processor introduction (English)
• Bol Processor introduction (français)
• Poster on the Bol Processor project (20MB PDF file)
• Latest features
• BP2 documentation
• Older documentation (for versions prior to 2.9.6)
• Bol Processor project page on Sourceforge
• All file releases for this project
• Browse BP source code in the CVS repository

Forums and mailing lists

• General discussion forum
• Help forum
• Announcement mailing list
• Developer mailing list

Software that works with BP2

• For use on MacOS X
  • SimpleSynth - can playback BP2's MIDI output.
  • MidiKeys - enter MIDI data with this onscreen piano keyboard.
  • Csound - a powerful music and sound synthesizer without the limitations of MIDI.
  • MacCsound - a graphical front end for Csound on OS X.
• For use on MacOS 7-9
  • Csound for MacOS Classic - more information and downloads related to Csound
  • Opcode's OMS - needed for MIDI playback on OS 9.
  • OMS Software Development Kit (for developers) - needed to compile BP2 for OS 9.

Downloads

Bol Processor 2.9.6 (final)

• BP2 application, documentation, and examples for MacOS X 10.2 or later (packaged as a MacOS X disk image)
• BP2 application, documentation, and examples for MacOS 7-9 (packaged as a MacOS disk image)
• BP2 source code and developer docs (packaged as a MacOS disk image)

Bol Processor 2.9.5 (final)

• BP2 application, documentation, and examples for MacOS 7-9 (packaged as a MacOS disk image)
• BP2 source code and developer docs (packaged as a MacOS disk image)
• BP2 source code and developer docs (packaged as a platform-independent .tgz file)

License

Bol Processor is available under the "new" BSD license.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Sourceforge.net for their awesome, free hosting services for open source software projects!

This page last modified on July 13, 2007.