Bol Processor is a program for music composition and improvisation with real-time MIDI, MIDI file, and Csound output. It produces music from a set of rules (a compositional grammar) or from text scores typed or captured from a MIDI instrument. Bol Processor 2 was a shareware application developed by Bernard Bel with the help of Jim Kippen, Srikumar Karaikudi Subramanian, Harm Visser and enthusiastic users.
Thanks to the help of Anthony Kozar, Bol Processor is now released as free software (open source) under a BSD-style license.
This overview is based on Bernard Bel's invited communications in Graz (Austria) and Edinburgh (UK) at the end of October 2006. The Graz presentation took place in the context of the symposium "Virtual Gamelan Graz - Rules - Grammars - Modeling". In Edinburgh, the lecture had been invited in the Seminar of the Music, Informatics and Cognition research group at the University of Edinburgh.