Lesson 9 · Arlo

Breath

A song needs to breathe. It needs moments of expansion and moments of contraction. Moments of sound and moments of silence. Moments of density and moments of air. A song that is dense from start to finish exhausts the listener. A song that is sparse from start to finish loses the listener. The art is in the breathing.

The rest of this lesson

Arlo takes this apart properly inside Songmatter — the rest of the lesson, the exercise that goes with it, and a critic who reads what you write back.

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