Frequently Asked Questions

Flowful audio has been designed to work best when you are attempting to get into a flow state of work. Periods of deep work can be enhanced and maintained for longer by using focus music to block out distractions. Set off a Flowful track of your choice just before you start to focus.

All tracks on Flowful are infinite-length generators, rather than fixed length songs. This means the tracks are made by piecing together audio parts, made by a human, and adding small elements of randomness so that the tracks have their own unique, identifiable sound, but never distract you when you're trying to focus.

The main reason this method was chosen was to stop flow-breaking events happening in the audio we listen to. All too often other streaming services will shuffle on something not fit for concentration once your focus playlist is over. This can break flow, which can take over 20 minutes to re-gain. Infinite-length tracks ensure you get the most out of your time spent focusing.

Everyone's taste is different. A lot of the reasoning behind why focus music works is because our brains enjoy listening to it, which in turn improves our motivation to get things done. If you're not sure what will work, try one of each style on our site, and see which works best.

I sketch out a song as maybe a 30s snippet in a DAW as if I was making a usual, non-generative track. Then I record a bunch of samples from VSTs I have. Once I have the samples I upload them to a server, which you request when you load up a song.
In your browser, the generators (which is another way of saying 'track') then piece together these samples in ways I have coded. So for example, I might have a list of chords which sound good, and a loop which selects from that set. Or maybe a bunch of note patterns to play at a certain interval, but they only have a small probability to play. To make it always unique (and hopefully always fairly interesting), I do things like automate filters, introduce randomness, and switch things around based on how long the track has been running for. Each track has it's own pre-defined set of samples and musical key. The code works on the arrangement, randomness and modulation over time. These random effects are different every play, and so each person will have a slightly different song than the next.

The track art is made by the DALL-E-2 AI. It's awesome and I advise checking it out if you don't already know about it. I think it's pretty cool that, technically, the track you are listening to is 100% generated by a computer, art included!