Dividing Time – FlowFrame

Post author By mich5812
Post date May 19, 2025
No Comments on Dividing Time – FlowFrame

Time, Sliced and Felt

Time is the raw material of every practice session. When I began building FlowFrame in January 2025 I was staring down four uncertain years and trying to decide how I would make it through them. I anticipated many uncomfortable feelings…

To deal with these, I determined the best path for me was to take it one day at a time, one activity at a time. I started setting goals: health and wellness, musical/artistic, family and social, scholarly, etc. That attitude became the backbone of the app and of my own routine.

Two verbs kept circling my mind:

experience — the qualitative, subjective swirl of the present
divide — the quantitative habit of chopping moments into measurable units

Holding both at once is tricky, yet musicians have to. Enter the pair of concepts that guides all of my work: the training mindset and trusting mindset.

Training ↔︎ Trusting

Note: when I talk about “practice,” I’m talking about the deliberate, repeatable engagement with a task (guided by feedback and reflection) undertaken to turn effort into embodied skill, insight, and character. Like someone practices yoga or a religion or music.

My practice philosophy involves two mindsets and an awareness of which is predominant:

Training – conscious effort, measurement, repetition, slow metronome clicks, tuner drones, detailed notes on articulation and intonation.

Trusting – presence, intuition, reacting in real time, “playing with my eyes,” letting muscle and memory do their jobs.

My goal is 1) to spend more time in the trusting mindset so it is the one I default to in times of stress, but 2) to spend enough time in the training mindset that the instincts I fall back on are grounded in efficiency.

An example is cooking.

When I’m learning a brand-new recipe I put on my training hat: I weigh the flour to the gram, set timers for every stage of the roux, and write little reminders like “whisk constantly or it will scorch.” But once I’ve made that dish a half-dozen times, I flip to trusting mode. Now I can feel when the sauce thickens, eyeball salt, and taste-adjust on the fly while chatting with my kids. The meal still ends up on the table, but the path there feels completely different (and a lot more alive) because the hard measurements have already been internalized.

How I used to structure my musical work

Count back from the performance date.
If I had six weeks, week one was nothing but slow reps: half-tempo, subdivided clicks, tuner drones, isolated intervals… absolutely everything under the microscope.
Build the piece brick by brick.
• Loop small fragments until they felt physical.
• Gradually string fragments into phrases, phrases into sections.
• Nudge the metronome up a couple of BPM only after the previous tempo felt automatic.
Transition to performance mode.
A certain amount of time out from the performance, I’d accept the technique I had and start running the work in full takes, exactly as I’d play it on stage: no pausing, no stopping for something missed. I’d record those run-throughs, note the spots where nerves crept in, then run mini-concerts for friends. The goal was to habituate my nervous system to “show time” so that, when the real concert arrived, the trusting mindset was already warmed up.

Why paper journals stopped cutting it

Handwritten logs were better than nothing, but they had real drawbacks:

Hard to search. I could never remember whether that magical practice breakthrough happened in the green notebook or the black one.
No big-picture view. It’s impossible to spot three months of tempo creep or a week-long slump by flipping pages.
Zero backup. One spilled coffee or lost backpack and an entire season of notes disappears.
No prompts or reminders. A blank page doesn’t ask you if you pushed comfort zones or hit your weekly hour goal.
Data silos. Metronome markings, timer totals, repertoire lists, and reflection notes all lived in different margins.

I wanted a single place that honored both mindsets: rigorous enough for “training me,” fluid enough for “trusting me.”

Enter FlowFrame’s Review system

FlowFrame’s Review tab grew directly out of that need. After every session you get two complementary spaces:

Experience notes (Trusting).
A free-form textbox for anything subjective: “felt weightless in the coda,” “right hand tense during arpeggios,” “lost track of breathing when the kids ran through the room.” Tie sensations to exact practice sessions.
Data log (Training).
Behind the scenes FlowFrame captures the hard numbers:
- Practice Heatmap – a calendar view that color-codes days by total minutes so you see at a glance where the streaks and gaps are.
- Duration Trends – a rolling graph of daily, weekly, and monthly totals, perfect for spotting over-practice risk or under-practice ruts.
- Tag Distribution – every practice block can be tagged (e.g., “Lip Slurs,” “Bach 2,” “Mindfulness”). The distribution wheel shows exactly where your time is going.
- Tempo Progress – FlowFrame stores the start and end tempo for every click-based drill, then plots your fastest comfortable tempo over time. Watching that line climb is ridiculously motivating.

Because all of that lives in the same place, you can click any heat-box or tag slice and instantly open the subjective notes you wrote that day. “Oh, that was the session where I discovered the alternate slide position. No wonder the tempo jumped.”

Why this matters

The Review system turns practice into a feedback loop:

Plan – set tomorrow’s goals based on today’s data.
Act – track in real time while the metronome, drones, or timer run.
Reflect – jot how it felt, what surprised you, what to tweak.
Adapt – let the heatmap and graphs reveal patterns you can’t feel in the moment.

Little by little, the training mindset inputs get converted into trusting mindset instincts, exactly the balance I was chasing when I started FlowFrame in that chilly January of 2025.

Tags Advice, Music, Practice

Feature Music News Practice

FlowFrame

I made a thing. It’s called FlowFrame. It’s a practice suite.

Prelude: The Line Between Boredom and Overwhelm

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Psychologists map flow on a simple graph: challenge on one axis, skill on the other. When the two rise together you enter the flow channel. Below it lurks boredom, above it anxiety.

Instrumental practice lives on that razor’s edge. Push too hard and the metronome becomes an accusing tyrant; coast too long and you start scrolling instead of shedding. Staying inside the channel demands a frame that grows with you.

Frames, Not Cages

I made FlowFrame to be a tool that enables musical expression, not one that dictates it. In my own practice, I wanted something flexible enough to support exploration—but firm enough to provide structure. Not a cage, but a frame.

A good practice framework does three things:

• Clarifies the immediate goal. (“Lock in my rhythm and pitch.”)
• Provides real-time feedback. (Was that tuplet really even?)
• Scales the next challenge upward the moment mastery appears.

FlowFrame does all of this in a way that puts the user in control. You’re not just following a pre-built track, you’re designing your own terrain. Whether you’re creating click patterns from scratch, linking pitch drones to rhythmic cycles, or building a progressive routine for a student, FlowFrame adapts to your artistic goals.

How It Compares

Tool Type	What It Offers	What It Misses	FlowFrame’s Difference
Metronomes (Soundbrenner, Pro Metronome)	A basic pulse, subdivision	No harmony, no piece-length programming, no context	Full-score metronome with programmable clicks, tuplets, modulations, and drones
Tuners (Tonal Energy, Tunable)	Pitch accuracy, visual feedback	No rhythmic context, no timing support	Real-time harmonic support aligned to rhythm, not isolated tones
DAWs (Ableton, Logic, Reaper)	Total flexibility	High setup time, steep learning curve, overkill for basic tasks	Zero setup browser-based environment for rhythm + pitch + structure
Music-Minus-One apps (Metronaut, Tomplay)	Pre-recorded tracks, built-in repertoire	Fixed repertoire, no customization	Fully customizable patterns + public pattern library = personalized, shareable practice content

Where these tools specialize narrowly (timing, pitch, playback) FlowFrame unifies those elements around your musical goals. The frame holds when you need it, and it disappears when you don’t.

Beyond the Widget

• FlowFrame isn’t another “metronome-plus.” It’s a practice ecosystem:
• Timing drones & harmonies anchored to any click pattern for rock-solid pitch.
• Educator linking that turns assignments and feedback into an asynchronous dialogue.
• Growing pattern library that crowdsources solutions to tomorrow’s rhythmic puzzles.
• FreeFlow timers for pieces ruled by seconds instead of bars.

In other words, it’s the scaffolding that lets musicians climb higher without losing their footing.

Epilogue: A Wider Horizon

Flow thrives on balance: challenge and ability, structure and spontaneity. FlowFrame’s job is to hold that balance just long enough for you to tip it again, to move the horizon a measure farther. It is, quite literally, a frame for flow and the better the frame, the more daring the art that can live inside it.

Tags Flow, FlowFrame, Metronome, Practice

Contemporary Music Feature Music

The Art of Noticing

An Experiment in Musical Mindfulness

You know that feeling when you’ve spent weeks with a piece of music, and suddenly you start hearing all these little details you missed before? The way a particular harmony shifts, or how two instruments blend in just the right way? As musicians, we get this experience all the time. But what about our audiences? Why is there a perception that audiences consider contemporary classical music to be inaccessible?

This question hit home recently during a concert I organized with the Lawrence University New Music Ensemble (LuNuMu). We were premiering nine new works written for an admittedly unusual combination – flute ensemble and trombone ensemble (more on that later). But instead of just throwing these brand new pieces at our audience, we tried something different, inspired by psychologist Ellen Langer‘s research on the power of “noticing.”

The Problem with New Music (It’s Not What You Think)

Here’s the thing about contemporary classical music: it often gets a bad rap for being “difficult” or “inaccessible.” I know I’m not alone in believing that’s not really the problem at all. Maybe the real issue is that we’re asking audiences to instantly appreciate complex musical works that we, as performers, have spent weeks or months getting to know.

Think about your favorite album. Chances are, you didn’t fall in love with it on the first listen. You noticed new things each time you played it – that subtle bass line, the background vocals, the way the drums drop out in the bridge. But in classical music, especially with premieres, we typically give audiences exactly one shot to “get it.”

Enter: The Noticing Experiment

So we tried something different. Armed with Langer’s research showing that the simple act of noticing increases positive experiences, we turned our audience into active participants. Through a QR code projected during the performance, we invited them to share what they noticed in each piece.

The responses were fascinating. Some people zeroed in on technical elements like microtonality and percussive effects. Others went pure emotion: “thrilling,” they wrote, or “horror-movie-like.” Some noticed the “fluttering” quality of certain passages, while others found moments of mystery.

What’s particularly interesting is how these observations started to create a kind of collective listening experience. While our performers had weeks to discover these pieces’ complexities and subtleties, our audience was discovering them in real time, sharing their observations like a group of musical explorers mapping new territory.

Beyond Just Listening

Here’s what makes this approach so powerful: it transforms the audience from passive listeners into active participants. Instead of just sitting there trying to absorb everything at once, they’re engaged in a process of discovery. It’s like giving them a lens through which to focus their attention, making the unfamiliar more approachable.

And yes, all of this happened during a concert featuring the somewhat unlikely combination of flute and trombone ensembles (a story involving professional collaboration and marriage – but that’s for another blog post). The point is that when we give audiences tools to engage with new music, magical things can happen.

The Bigger Picture

This experiment suggests something important about how we present contemporary music. Maybe instead of worrying about making new music more “accessible,” we should focus on helping audiences develop their own relationship with it. By encouraging active listening and noticing, we’re not just presenting music – we’re creating an environment for discovery.

Think about it: when was the last time you really noticed what you were hearing? Not just listened, but actively noticed? Try it sometime. You might be surprised at what you discover.