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 D

Dictation

Education
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 teaching practice in which learners write down language spoken aloud by a teacher or recording. It develops listening, spelling, punctuation, and attention to sound.

Detailed Definition
Dictation has long been used in language and literacy education to connect attentive hearing with accurate writing. In poetry lessons, students may transcribe a poem before seeing its printed version, then compare what they heard with the poet’s line breaks, punctuation, capitalization, and stanza shapes. This process reveals that spoken phrasing and visual form can create different effects. Dictation also strengthens awareness of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and homophones. It appears in poetry education because verse is both oral and written, and careful transcription can make students more alert to the choices that shape a poem’s meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
In poetry dictation, the teacher reads a short stanza aloud while students write what they hear and then compare versions; Students take dictation of a poem’s first lines to practice attentive listening, punctuation, and line breaks; After dictation, the class discusses how hearing a poem differs from seeing it on the page; A teacher dictates a rhyming quatrain and asks students to identify its rhyme scheme after transcribing it
Additional Notes
Dictation trains attentive listening, spelling, punctuation, and awareness of phrasing. For poetry study, dictate a short passage and compare students’ versions with the original to discuss line breaks, pauses, capitalization, and sound. It can also reveal how oral delivery influences a listener’s assumptions about a poem’s structure.
Also Known As
Oral Transcription Write-Down Exercise Spoken Text Recording Dictation Practice
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