A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

Armonica

Musical Instrument
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A glass harmonica, producing ethereal tones by rubbing moistened fingers on rotating glass bowls

Detailed Definition
Invented by Benjamin Franklin, the armonica’s haunting, otherworldly sound captivated 18th-century audiences and inspired Romantic poets who associated its tones with spirits, melancholy, or the sublime; its fragility and spectral resonance make it a metaphor for transient beauty in verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
Benjamin Franklin’s armonica inspired Goethe to write of its “ethereal glass tears” in lyrical prose; In Gothic poetry, the armonica’s eerie shimmer evokes ghostly presences or lost innocence; Poets compare its rotating bowls to planets singing in celestial harmony; The armonica appears in feminist verse as a reclaimed instrument of 18th-century female virtuosos; Its fragility becomes a metaphor for the delicate balance between beauty and madness; Modern sound poets reference the armonica to explore the boundary between music and silence.
Additional Notes
The armonica (or glass harmonica), invented by Benjamin Franklin, uses rotating glass bowls played with wet fingers to produce eerie, crystalline tones; its otherworldly sound fascinated Mozart and Goethe and was once believed to induce madness—poets can deploy it as a symbol of fragility, enlightenment-era curiosity, or spectral beauty.
Also Known As
Glass harmonica glass armonica harmonica
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