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

Autoharp

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 stringed instrument with dampers activated by buttons, used for chordal accompaniment

Detailed Definition
The autoharp’s gentle, resonant strumming appears in folk poetry to signify simplicity, domestic music-making, or Appalachian heritage; its ease of play and warm harmonies often symbolize communal storytelling and the democratization of musical expression in lyrical contexts.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Appalachian folk poetry, the autoharp’s strummed chords accompany verses of labor and longing; Poets describe the autoharp’s dampened strings as “whispering secrets through a veil”; Its use in gospel settings lends the autoharp a voice of humble devotion in spiritual verse; The autoharp’s simplicity becomes a metaphor for clarity amid emotional complexity; In memoir-poems, the autoharp recalls childhood evenings filled with family song; Contemporary poets use the autoharp to evoke authenticity—its unamplified sound resisting digital noise.
Additional Notes
The autoharp is a fretless zither with chord bars that dampen strings, producing harp-like strums; its gentle, folk-tinged resonance suits lyrical or introspective verse—often used in Appalachian and singer-songwriter traditions, it can evoke simplicity, domesticity, or quiet emotional revelation in poetic imagery.
Also Known As
Chord zither
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