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Breath has a contour.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

Now imagine that contour living in the baseline, a line that rises when you inhale, sustains when you hold, and descends when you exhale.

Not as a metaphor, as a map.

What happens when breath turns into bar lines, or when a time signature becomes a nervous system?

This is Shadow Scores.

Welcome back to Shadow Scores.

Part confessional, part laboratory, part interplay of sound and silence, shadow and light.

I'm Srnmc, composer, scientist, lifelong scribbler of staff lines.

Each episode, I take you into the shadows of the score.

Into the how, the why.

Analyzing the constraints, the engineering, the hidden scaffolding that makes a piece feel inevitable.

The small decisions that look harmless on paper and bite in the mix.

In this episode, we're stepping into my newest release, Shadow Etudes, Six Movements for a Quiet Mind.

It's live now on all streaming platforms.

Six movements, one piano, one key.

And a constraint that forced me to write in a way I normally wouldn't.

Because Shadow Etudes started in a place that demanded precision of a different kind.

It required me to breathe life into the music.

Quite literally.

Shadow Etudes began as a commission for Pausing Point, an app built around breathwork and nervous system regulation.

Not the incense and mountains version of breathwork, the practical version.

The version you use between meetings when your mind feels like it has 38 tabs open and one of them is playing music that you just can't locate.

The brief was deceptively simple.

Write six contemporary piano pieces, each around five minutes long, and each aligned with a different breathing pattern and mental state.

Focus, calm, relax, unwind, balance, energize.

On paper, it sounds like mood writing.

But it's not just mood.

It's also mechanics.

I wasn't writing music that feels calm.

I was writing music that can hold a breath pattern without fighting it.

Breath isn't a vibe.

It has a shape.

It's ratios.

It's pacing.

It's an internal metronome the body innately understands.

So the question became, how do you write music that can affect something as fundamental as your very breath?

At the beginning of this project, I imposed a few rules that ended up making the album what it is.

Rule 1.

Solo piano only.

I went back to the basics.

No strings, no pads, no cinematic fog machine.

One instrument exposed.

If the idea fails, it fails in full light.

Rule 2.

Everything in C major.

The most basic key, the default setting, which sounds almost comical if you live in contemporary classical land, where we collect accidentals like souvenirs.

It was a deliberate choice to strip away complexity, get back to the basics, and force the interest to come from structure, voicing, motion, and time.

Rule 3.

60 BPM.

One beat per second.

And this was a practical choice.

If a breathing pattern is counted in seconds, then 60 BPM lets the music become a literal timing device.

One second equals one count in the breath sequence.

It's a quiet kind of science.

The body likes consistency.

The nervous system responds to predictable pacing.

Slowing your breath can influence heart rate variability and vagal tone, which calms down your nervous system.

And the simplest way to slow your breath is to give it a stable grid.

So I built one.

And that brings us to the backbone of the whole album.

The bass line is a breathing reminder.

This was my anchor.

Because minds wonder.

That's just what they do.

So I wanted a motif you could always return to, even subconsciously.

A you are here marker that stays in the base like a compass needle.

And in most movements of Shadow Etudes, the intro is essentially that baseline motif alone.

It sets the scene and tells your body which pattern you're in before any color arrives.

Then enter the treble.

The melodies interweave, add story, add light, add texture.

But they still tend to mirror the same inhale, hold, exhale arc of the breathing patterns.

They support the baseline without stealing its job.

And that was one of the hardest parts, keeping the pieces interesting without making them demanding, keeping them calming without turning them into wallpaper.

The baseline does the guiding, and the melodies do the dreaming.

But the biggest challenge was how to turn the breathing patterns into music.

My answer was creative time signature use.

Some breathing patterns, like the focus pattern, sit neatly inside common time.

The focus pattern is basically box breathing.

Inhale for four, hold for four counts, exhale for four, and hold for another four counts.

A neat square.

And musically, that's very friendly.

It's symmetrical, it fits in common time without arguing.

So, the focus movement, or Lux One.

Let me stay in four-four timing, and carve a shape with the phrasing and repetition over the top.

Other patterns were not so neat.

When you get to patterns like the unwind breathing pattern, inhale for four, hold for seven.

Exhale for eight.

That's not a square, it's not symmetrical, it's a corridor that changes in length while you're walking down it, getting longer and longer as it goes.

And to match it, honestly, I couldn't just write a piece in 4-4 and hope the listener's lungs would politely adapt.

The music had to move with the breath, so I changed time signatures within the same breath.

We start at 4-4, then move to 7-4 during the hold, and finish with 8-4 during the exhale.

But each of these changes still needed to occur within one breath, one continuous arc, so I needed to change time signatures three times within the same effortless 19 count breath.

It had to feel inevitable, like the body deciding to let go, while still being musically interesting.

And that was the biggest challenge of Shadow Etudes, hiding the mouth inside the music.

So let's unpack each piece in the Shadow Etudes album a little more.

All six movements are titled Lux.

Lux is Latin for light.

But this is not daylight.

This is interior light, noir light, the slit under a door, the afterimage, the glow that remains when you close your eyes.

Lux 1 was based around the focused breathing pattern.

This was the most structurally stable movement.

Common time behaves.

The breath square is clean.

Lux 2 follows the energized breathing pattern.

Inhale for 4.

And exhale for a quick 2.

The shortest cycle of the series.

Brighter pacing, still controlled, more staccato elements than semiquavers used to give it some brightness and energy while still remaining at 60 BPM.

Lux 3 was the calm breathing pattern.

Inhale for 4.

Hold for 2.

Exhale for 6.

A longer exhale, longer phrasing, the music starts to feel like it's leaning back.

The breath pattern forces an asymmetry, and the music has to feel steady and remain calm, while time itself shifts under it.

It was an interesting challenge to combine the shifting time signatures with an overarching phrasing pattern to make the music feel effortless and guide your breathing to a steady, calm state.

Lux 4 follows the relaxed breathing pattern.

Inhale for 4.

Exhale for 6.

A simpler ratio that lets the phrases soften without collapsing.

I leaned into a more lullaby feeling for this one, where the music is trying to gently lull you into the dark.

Lux 5 was built around the balanced breathing pattern.

Inhale for 5.

Exhale for 5.

We're back to symmetry again, but not square.

This one was in 5-4 time throughout, with a driving rise and fall pattern, like a steady pendulum swinging back and forth.

And finally, Lux 6 follows the unwind breathing pattern.

Inhale for four.

Hold for seven.

Exhale for eight.

This is the Long Corridor, the hardest to make feel natural, because time has to stretch in a way that still feels like one continuous arc.

In Lux 6 especially, you're dealing with breath as a narrative, a steady inhale, followed by a long-held suspension, then an even longer descent.

Each cycle has to complete its own story before the next begins.

Here's the thing about writing quiet mind music.

When you write inside a simple key with a simple instrument, the difference between clean and bland is microscopic.

If you try too hard to be calming, you become decorative.

If you become decorative, the listener stops listening.

If the listener stops listening, the mind wanders straight back into noise.

So, the real job of Shadow Etudes was not to sedate.

It was to hold attention lightly.

Like you'd hold a glass of water in the dark.

Firm enough not to spill.

Soft enough not to shake.

That's why I kept the harmony simple and the structure clear.

It's why C major mattered.

It's why timing mattered.

The simplicity isn't there to make it easy.

It's there to make it believable.

In the context of the Pausing Point app, these six pieces have a job to do.

To guide your breath.

Releasing them as Shadow Etudes gives them a second life.

In the app, they support a practice.

On the album, they become a standalone cycle.

You can still use them with breathwork, obviously.

The grid is baked into the music.

The bassline will anchor you.

But you can also just let them play while you write, while you drive, while you stare at a ceiling and negotiate with your own thoughts.

Study music, sleep music, background music, music when you're not trying to feel something, or music when you want to feel everything.

I like music that can do both.

Work as a tool, yet still survive as an art.

That's always been the Srnmc tension point.

Science and art, sharing the same air.

So, how to listen?

There's no rituals, just practicalities.

If you want to go on a calming journey, listen in order, Lux 1 through Lux 6.

The album is a sequence of systems.

If you want to use it for breathing, take your pick of moods.

From morning energize to evening unwind, give it a spin.

But most importantly, don't stress about being perfect.

The baseline will always be there to anchor you.

So, if your mind wonders, good.

The music was built with that in mind.

And if you catch yourself breathing differently halfway through, that means the system worked.

So, what's next?

This album was the first step in a larger experiment.

Shadow Etudes is one texture.

Solo piano, one key, one tempo, six grids.

The next release expands the palette.

New timbres, new ensembles, new ways of letting music guide your breath.

So stay tuned.

Shadow Etudes, Six Movements for a Quiet Mind is out now on all streaming platforms.

After you listen, tell me which locks resonated with you the most.

And if you're listening to Shadow Etudes as a breathing tool, and want more sessions built around the same idea, why not check out the Pausing Point app?

That's where a wider library lives.

More guided music, more soundscapes, more small, deliberate pauses for a life that doesn't stop asking.

Sometimes you don't need more time, you need a better pause.

Thanks for tuning in.

I'm Srnmc, and this has been Shadow Scores.