FlowNote: Making Bodily Experiences Visible in Music Production

Abstract

Creative work is deeply embodied, yet creative histories captured by most tools largely center on changes to external artifacts, leaving bodily experience difficult to revisit. We present FlowNote, a system that augments digital music-production histories with physiological data to support retrospective reflection. FlowNote synchronizes FL Studio interaction events, workspace recordings, and physiological signals captured by EmotiBit, then clusters intervals with similar physiological configurations and surfaces repeated occurrences as Pattern Suggestions. Users can inspect these suggestions or select moments themselves, revisit them in context, and annotate them in their own words. Saved annotations remain linked to the underlying session data for cross-session retrieval. FlowNote explores how bodily experiences can become part of creative histories while keeping interpretation in the user’s hands.