What happens when equations start to dance? In this debut episode of Shadow Scores, I take you inside Newton’s Laws Dance Suite by SRNMC, a composition born from the collision of physics and music. What started as a university project has since been expanded, orchestrated, and reimagined into a full suite, where inertia pulses in hypnotic quavers, force explodes in sforzandos, and action and reaction unfold as a duet of tension and release.

This isn’t just about notes on a page - it’s about the shadows beneath them. Equal parts science, sweat, and scoring, this episode is a journey through motion, mechanics, and the strange poetry of physics turned sound.

Five pieces. Three laws. One slightly sleep-deprived composer who thought, ‘You know what this music project needs? Physics.’

Welcome to Shadow Scores.

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

I'm Srnmc, composer, scientist, lifelong scribbler of staff lines, and serial offender when it comes to last-minute deadlines.

Each episode, I'll be taking you behind the score, into the how, the why, and the occasional what-in-the-name-of-physics-was-I-thinking that shaped my compositions.

Whether it's glockenspiels or gravity, grooves that slip, or metaphors that spiral out of control, this is the place where the notes get to tell their secrets.

A bit of background on me, I'm a composer and the restless mind behind SRNMC.

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by the way that music can hold a mirror to life.

Capturing emotions, telling stories, sometimes even refracting the chaos of existence into something you can actually hum.

My journey with music has been equal parts experiment and accident, and this podcast is where I invite you to join me in that strange laboratory.

So, what can you expect from Shadow Scores?

We'll be diving deep into the stories behind my own compositions, the experiments, the collisions, the accidents and the sparks.

I'll bring you into my notebooks and reflective journals, sometimes pages scribbled by a younger, far more caffeinated version of me, trying to make sense of things.

And other times, the slightly older me, still chaotic, still trying to make sense of things.

But this isn't just about notes on a page.

It's about what shadows them.

The ideas, the emotions, the passions, and yes, even the science that slips into my music when I'm not looking.

Because I'm not only a composer, I'm also a physicist.

And that physics has a way of sneaking into my scores, like an uninvited guest.

Case in point, the piece we're dissecting tonight, Newton's Laws Dance Suite.

That's right, Newton's Three Laws of Motion spun into a dance suite.

This was one of the later works I wrote back in university.

A composition that melded together two of my passions at the time, equations and melodies.

A piece that tried to turn the elegance of physics into something audible, something kinetic.

In this episode, I'll take you back to that moment.

How a student split between science and art decided to make Newton dance.

Let's rewind the clock and revisit how Newton's Laws Dance Suite came to be.

It began as a university project, wide open in scope.

Compose, analyze, perform, anything really, as long as it was musical.

A challenge, an experiment, a blank canvas.

At the time, I was a dual-degree student.

On one hand, I was exploring how the universe works, and on the other hand, I was surrounded by the melodies and harmonies of life.

And for me, the collision of those worlds wasn't optional.

It was inevitable.

It was my daily reality.

So finding a way to make science sing felt like the most natural choice.

But finding the right balance in how to convey science as music was a bit of a process.

The core of my research involved investigating how to compose music for contemporary dance, and more importantly, how to make choreography and music breathe the same story.

And I realized that the two main aspects that enabled the music and dancer to flow seamlessly together were a compelling story line, and ensuring that the composition and choreography complemented each other.

One of my early journal entries captures this turning point.

The quest for a theme to base the dance on was centered on science, in particular, physics.

I am a dual degree science arts student majoring in physics and music, so what better way to fully express myself than to combine my two passions into one project?

For me, the beauty of physics lies in its elegance, the way equations can distill the world's complexity into clarity.

When you place that alongside dance and music, physics stops being abstract and becomes more visceral.

Talk, momentum, force, frequency, pitch.

It all moves.

It all resonates.

Carlos Galetti, who composed the Quantum Ballet, once said that there are some basic patterns of the universe, and music has the ability to express the beauty of those patterns.

But here was the challenge.

How do you make the science clear, without reducing the art to an explanation?

I didn't want a lecture with background music.

I wanted the audience to feel the laws, not memorize them.

Which meant choosing principles that were both fundamental and widely understood.

Ones that could be translated into motion and melody without a textbook.

The music and dance shouldn't have to work to explain the physics.

Instead, they should feel like an extension of the laws, and the connection must appear effortless.

I needed a way to make it relatable, to turn these scientific principles into something you could see, hear, and feel.

This led me to consider the essence of dance.

The movement.

The leaps.

The turns.

The lifts.

After reflecting on these key points, I realized they were very reminiscent of the very first physical principles you ever learn.

Newton's Three Laws of Motion The elegance.

The simplicity.

The way they describe almost everything in our physical world.

They were perfect.

Common knowledge.

Endlessly applicable.

And already metaphorical in their essence.

The first law, inertia.

The second, force and acceleration.

The third, action and reaction.

Simple enough to grasp, but profound enough to carry weight in music and dance alike.

They became my storyline.

My cast of characters.

So I started sketching.

Outlines turned into puzzles.

How do you turn inertia into sound?

How do you capture acceleration without overwhelming the dance?

How do you stage action and reaction as a duet?

Each question forced me deeper into the score.

Piece by piece, section by section, the suite began to take shape.

And that's where we'll start tonight.

The prologue of Newton's Laws Dance Suite.

The opening act of a journey where physics and music collide, and the shadows between them begin to dance.

Precision machines ticking away with inevitability.

The prologue begins with a five-bar C and C major.

Each music box enters at a different time, spinning the same melody into a round.

The effect is hypnotic.

Overlapping, interlocking, dances stepping into one another's echoes.

Dotted crotchets, quavers, intervals of a third, simple, almost innocent gestures.

And yet beneath the simplicity lies order.

Dynamics?

Almost none.

A consistent mezzo forte, the only swell and sound coming from the addition of each glockenspiel.

Old music boxes didn't rise and fall.

They clicked along like clockwork.

Predictable.

Mechanical.

Unyielding.

So my melody does the same.

Circling.

Repeating.

Inevitable.

And then, just like any real mechanism would, it slows.

A subtle ritardendo.

Gears unwinding.

Tensions fading.

Motion winding down.

The metaphor couldn't be clearer.

The music boxes are the laws themselves.

Unsentimental.

Predictable.

The stage is set.

The symmetry in place.

3 boxes.

3 laws.

3 shadows.

About to move.

And now, we step into the first law of motion.

The law of inertia.

An object at rest stays at rest.

An object in motion stays in motion.

Same speed.

Same direction.

Unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

When I first composed this movement, it was stripped back.

Spoken voice, solo violin, piano, and nothing more.

Since then, I've expanded it.

A full string orchestra, piano and percussion section, driving the beat with more urgency.

Why?

Because the law needed more weight.

It needed gravity.

Words alone weren't enough to reveal the undercurrent of meaning.

I wanted the audience to not just watch inertia, but to feel it seep into their bones.

So I sifted through the laws, pulling key words.

Words that resonated.

Words that could echo in both the dancer's movement and the score itself.

Spoken text became a bridge, threading science into art and whispering physics beneath the melody.

The heartbeat of the piece is a pulse of quavers, constant, relentless, an unyielding TikTok that refuses silence, hypnotic as a clock in a dark room.

Six sections spiral out from that pulse, each exploring a different facet of inertia.

First, constant motion, a flowing melody, steady, predictable, stillness mirrored in sound.

Then, same speed, same direction.

The music turns trance-like, unwavering in its path.

Rhythm locked in, focus sharpened to a single line of motion.

Until the unbalanced force arrives, accidentals bite, dissonance crawls in.

The once stable pulse is fractured, harmony pulled apart.

It's no longer order, but conflict, a musical tug of war between balance and chaos.

Dynamics explode.

What was once calm becomes jagged.

What was smooth becomes sharp.

In the final section, the pulse presses on, softer now, fading, but never surrendering.

It's the sound of persistence.

I shaped it to echo a Newton's cradle, those polished steel balls clanging back and forth on strings.

In the recording, the melody itself swings from left to right across the stereo field, back and forth, back and forth, gradually fading, but never stopping.

For the dancers, my sketches and notes imagined their bodies teetering between statuesque stillness and sudden violent motion.

Frozen one moment, explosive the next.

Physical embodiments of a principle.

The science of stillness.

The poetry of disruption.

And that was the first law.

Inertia made audible.

Motion and stillness bound together, refusing to let go.

Next, we step into the second law of motion.

Force equals mass times acceleration.

If the first law was about resistance, this one is about propulsion, energy, impact, change.

A principle that doesn't just describe motion, it commands it.

I built this movement as a study in transformation.

Split into nine sections, each one exploring a different expression of the equation.

It opens with no hesitation, a bold explosive theme, an orchestral strike like a detonation of potential energy.

Drums thunder, the full ensemble surges forward, and over it all, the spoken voice declares the law itself.

From the very first bar, it had to feel like a force unleashed.

Momentum follows.

Energy begins to accumulate.

The orchestra tightening, swelling, building pressure like a coil about to snap.

You can hear the tension rise, the air thick with it.

A musical equation preparing to tip into acceleration.

Change in momentum.

And then comes change in time.

I leaned into the obvious here, shifting from 4-4 to 3-4, and back again, letting the signature itself bend and lurch.

Change in time.

Each change jolts the listener, a reminder that acceleration isn't about strength alone.

It's about the rate of change, the measure of how quickly balance fractures.

The tempo stretches, contracts.

The dynamics surge, a roller coaster written in staves.

On stage, the dancers mirror this volatility.

Explosive bursts cut into sudden stillness, limbs whipping into space, then snapping back.

The choreography becomes a dialogue between unleashing and restraint, force and resistance, power and pause.

Change in direction.

Musically, the violin and piano tangle through rapid figures, speed and direction given voice.

Melodies diverge, scatter, collide.

Just when stability seems possible, another shift arrives.

A sforzando.

Then another.

Then another.

I admit, I indulged.

There's something irresistible about a marking that literally means forced.

Every chord hits like a punch.

Every passage marked by insistence.

Force is not just a metaphor.

It was inscribed into the very notation.

Acceleration, deceleration, rise, collapse.

The score twists and rises, the orchestra surging upwards like a rocket launched into space.

But what rises must fall, so gravity returns.

The music begins to free fall.

Air resistance whispers in the strings, subtle frictions in timbre and texture.

What could have remained abstract physics becomes tangible sound.

Mass colliding with momentum, motion struggling against drag.

And in the end, we return to where we began.

We close this movement as it opened, with force.

The same burst of energy that detonated at the start reappears at the end, like a circuit completing itself.

The loop is closed, the law remains.

With the second law behind us, we arrive at Newton's final law of motion.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This movement is a duet, or maybe a duel, two dances or dance groups, locked in a mirrored struggle.

Musically, I built it as a conversation between opposites, every phrase a reflection, every gesture an echo, a call, an answer, a push, a pull, two forces circling, colliding, reshaping one another.

The entire structure rests on paired concepts, action and reaction, equal and opposite, friction and release, tension and collapse, together and apart, flight and gravity.

Each pair its own theme, its own sonic identity.

Strings and piano embody the forces, sometimes collaborating, sometimes colliding.

In the action-reaction sections, one voice strikes, the other retaliates.

Sharp, direct, undeniable.

Then comes equal and opposite.

The melody splits, one line rises, the other falls.

Perfect symmetry, Yin and Yang traced across the stave.

Enter Tension, Tremolo.

The string section trembling, shimmering, vibrating with tension.

In Italian, tremolo translates to trembling, and it fit too perfectly to resist.

Friction becomes audible, the bow against the string itself an act of resistance.

Meanwhile, the piano presses forward, chords weighted, anchoring the sound.

The music feels like it's caught in a tug of war, and the choreography mirrors this.

Sometimes, bodies move in perfect unison.

Other times, they rip apart, opposites repelling each other.

Dancers act as mirror images, as foils, as combatants.

My favorite section emerges here, flight and gravity.

The strings soar upward, melodies drifting high and free, almost weightless.

But beneath them, the piano grounds the sound, chords heavy, insistent, gravitational.

The freedom of flight wrestles against the inevitability of falling.

The final section pulls everything into a furious back and forth.

Violin and piano firing phrases like ricochets, each rebound met with equal force.

Chaos threatens, but symmetry endures.

Every call has its answer.

Every note has its shadow.

The piece ends as it must, with a mirrored phrase, perfectly balanced.

Action, reaction.

That is the third law.

A composition of friction and harmony, of tension and release.

Opposition not as contradiction, but as balance.

And so we reach the end, the epilogue, the final piece of Newton's Laws Dance Suite, a coda that folds the journey back onto itself.

It opens where it all began, the music box theme, Glockenspiel again, its gentle nostalgic melody like a door swinging open to the past.

But this isn't a simple repetition, it's a reflection, a memory refracted through everything we've witnessed.

As the epilogue unfolds, fragments of each law resurface in reverse order, like echoes drifting back through time, starting with the third law, action and reaction.

Strings and piano call and respond in dialogue, tension balanced against release.

When the second law rises, force and acceleration, the melodies quicken, energy swells and collapses, motion surging in waves, the sound of momentum itself refusing stillness.

Finally, the first law returns.

That steady, relentless pulse of quavers.

Inertia, unbending, unstoppable.

The reminder that motion, once begun, carries on until something dares to resist it.

And then, like a countdown, the music circles back to the prologue.

The glockenspiel reclaims the stage, not alone this time, but jeweled with embellishments, delicate as starlight scattered around the theme.

Every instrument, every dancer, every idea traced back into its box.

What began as simplicity now returns layered, richer, heavier with meaning.

The suite comes full circle.

The dancers retreat.

The stage resets.

The laws of physics stand eternal, constant, inevitable.

Yet our own experience of them has shifted, deepened, changed.

The final notes fall soft, gentle, bittersweet.

The music box winds down with the same ritardendo we heard in the prologue, but this time, it carries more weight.

The gravity of everything we've lived through in sound.

And with that, the mechanism rests, and Newton's Laws Dance Suite comes to a close.

Each piece carries its own voice, its own narrative, but together, they weave something larger, a meditation on motion, balance, resistance, and the strange music that appears when science dares to dance.

But what you hear today isn't exactly the suite I wrote a decade ago.

Back then, it was skeletal.

Violin, piano, a spoken voice threading in the science.

A project held together with caffeine and midnight deadlines.

In the previous incarnation, it was just a composition, so there was no production, no mixing, no mastering.

Here's a short snippet of the earliest incarnation of Newton's Laws Dance Suite.

And now let's see how it compares against the final product.

Over the past year, I've torn it apart and rebuilt it, expanded it, reimagined it.

The trio has grown into a full orchestral body, depth added, textures layered, dynamics sharpened.

Every decision a reflection, a refinement, a rediscovery.

University Me handed in a composition.

Present Me produced an experience.

I had to breathe life into it at the production level.

EQ sculpting, balancing reverb, learning the language of space, turning flat staves into a surround field where instruments don't just play, they inhabit.

Two-dimensional sketches becoming immersive soundscapes.

Younger Me would probably be astonished at what the project has become.

Newton's Laws Dance Suite is no longer a student exercise.

It's a complete body of work, orchestrated, produced, mastered, and now set free into the world.

You can stream it anywhere under Srnmc.

So if you want to step into that orbit, give it a listen.

And let me know what shadows you hear between the score.

And that brings us to the end of this journey.

Five pieces, three laws, and one composer who once thought, you know what this dance project needs?

Physics.

It's been equal parts science, sweat, and scoring.

Revisiting it after ten years has been humbling.

A mix of, wow, past me was ambitious, and who let me near so many glockenspiels?

If you've enjoyed this shadowed wonder through music and motion, make sure to follow.

There's plenty more ahead.

Upcoming episodes may or may not involve time signatures I no longer understand, and metaphors that wandered too far into the dark and never came back.

Thanks for tuning in.

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

I'll see you next time, hopefully a little less entropic, but just as enthusiastic.