Pauses

A pause marker adds silence to a meditation script. Open Meadow has three pause types: standard, exact and open. They differ in how they respond to the spaciousness slider and to a target duration.

Syntax

A pause marker is a line that contains the word pause and a duration in square brackets. An optional flag after the duration sets the pause type.

[pause 10s]
[pause 8s exact]
[pause 90s open]

• Put each marker on its own line, with a blank line before and after it. A marker written inside a paragraph is moved to its own line automatically.
• Durations are whole numbers of seconds or minutes.
• Markers are not case sensitive. [Pause 10S] works the same as [pause 10s].
• A marker takes one flag at most: exact or open.
• There is no maximum length. Pauses of 2 seconds or longer work best, because the automatic gaps already cover shorter silences.

Open Meadow accepts several ways of writing a duration and stores them all in seconds:

Pause types

How pauses are adjusted

Speech audio is generated once. Pause lengths are calculated when the meditation plays, so they can change without new audio.

Spaciousness slider

The player's spaciousness slider goes from short pauses to long pauses and works while the meditation plays.

• At either end, the slider adds or removes up to 100% of each standard pause's written length.
• Open pauses get twice that increase when the slider moves toward long pauses. They shorten at the standard rate.
• Exact pauses never change.
• An adjusted pause is never shorter than 1 second.
• Open Meadow saves the slider position for each meditation. Downloaded audio uses the same adjusted pauses.

Target duration

When a meditation has a target duration, Open Meadow scales standard and open pauses together so the estimated length matches the target. Once speech audio exists, the calculation uses the real length of that audio. Open pauses take twice the share when the meditation needs to get longer. Speech and exact pauses are not changed. A script with only exact pauses cannot be adjusted to a target duration.

Automatic gaps

Playback adds short silences that are not written in the script:

• 2 seconds between spoken paragraphs.
• 3 seconds before each section, or 1 second when the previous section ends with a pause marker.
• A lead-in before the first words: 1 second, or 3 seconds with background music.
• A gap at the end: 3 seconds, or 5 seconds with background music and an ending sound. The ending sound plays after it.

Apart from that 1-second gap before a section, no gap is added next to a pause marker, so [pause 10s] plays as 10 seconds of silence. The gaps between paragraphs and before sections follow the spaciousness slider. They can grow up to 4 times their length and never drop below 1 second. The lead-in and the final gap do not change.

Choosing pause lengths

• 5 to 10 seconds between instructions.
• 15 seconds or more for a moment of practice.
• When the guidance asks for several breaths, enough time to complete them comfortably.
• Open pauses for the longest stretches of silent practice.
• Exact pauses when the timing must not change.

Example

This script uses a standard pause to settle, exact pauses for a counted breath, and an open pause for silent rest.

# Breathing Space

## Arriving

Find a comfortable position and let your eyes close.

[pause 10s]

## Counted Breath

Breathe in for four.

[pause 4s exact]

Breathe out for six.

[pause 6s exact]

## Resting

Let the breath return to its own rhythm, and rest here.

[pause 2 minutes open]

When you are ready, open your eyes.