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.

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 B

Between-tongue sound

Sound
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

Phonetic resonance or similarity that bridges words from different languages

Detailed Definition
Between-tongue sound refers to phonetic elements in a poem that evoke or mimic sounds from multiple languages simultaneously, creating a liminal auditory space that reflects bilingual or multilingual experience; this technique may involve homophonic play, shared phonemes, or transliterated syllables that resonate across linguistic boundaries, enriching the poem’s sonic texture and cultural depth.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” English lines echo Kikuyu sounds: “Corpses are scattered through a paradise”; in Kamau Brathwaite’s “Caliban,” English is inflected with Caribbean Creole phonetics; Ocean Vuong’s “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” blends Vietnamese tones into English phrasing; Louise Bennett’s Jamaican patois poems create between-tongue sonic textures in English script.
Additional Notes
Between-tongue sound captures phonetic textures that emerge when a poet writes in one language while evoking the sonic qualities of another (e.g., Creole inflections in English); key in postcolonial and diasporic poetry; listen for rhythm, stress, and vowel shifts that signal linguistic hybridity.
Also Known As
Translingual resonance Lingual hybridity Cross-idiom sonics Polyglot phonetics Interlingual rhyme
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