Profiles

Bernard Bel is a computer scientist with background in electronics. In 1979 he started collaborating with musicologists and musicians on a scientific study of North Indian melodic and rhythmic systems. In 1981 he designed and built the first accurate real-time melodic movement analyser (MMA) for the analysis of raga music, and he implemented an expert system (Bol Processor BP1) for the rule-based modelling of training methods in traditional Indian drumming.

In 1986 he joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Marseille. He studied artificial intelligence under Alain Colmerauer and graduated with a PhD in theoretical computer science in 1990.

Between 1994 an 1998, Bel was deputed to CENTRE DE SCIENCES HUMAINES (CSH, New Delhi).
A new version of Bol Processor (BP2) dedicated to generic music representations won the first price for computer-aided composition software in Bourges international festival (1997). This software is now shared as open source: https://bolprocessor.org.

In 1998 he joined LABORATOIRE PAROLE ET LANGAGE (CNRS, Aix-en-Provence). Together with colleagues he created the Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SproSIG) under the banner of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA).

Bernard Bel created the Speech & Language Data Repository, a service for the sharing and long-term preservation of oral/linguistic resources currently integrated in the ORTOLANG project.

Now retired from CNRS, he is working on a database of 110,000 grindmill songs collected in rural Maharashtra (India) with the support of People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), and continuing R and D on https://bolprocessor.org