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 F

Fricative

Prosody
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 consonant sound produced by forcing air through a narrow opening in the vocal tract

Detailed Definition
Fricatives include sounds like "f," "v," "s," "z," "sh," and "th," which create distinctive hissing, buzzing, or breathing qualities. In poetry, fricatives are essential to alliteration and assonance patterns; they also contribute significantly to a poem's sonic texture and emotional resonance, often creating softness or harshness depending on the specific sound and frequency of use.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the repeated /s/ fricatives in “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” create a hissing, ethereal effect; In Poe’s “The Raven,” the line “And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” uses /s/ and /z/ fricatives to mimic whispering; In Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty,” the phrase “swift, slow; sweet, sour” employs /s/ and /f/ fricatives to contrast textures; In Plath’s “Daddy,” the line “I have always been scared of you” uses the /s/ fricative to convey tension and fear; In Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” “The wind crosses the brown land, unheard” uses /s/ and /θ/ fricatives to evoke dryness and silence; In Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed” uses the /d/ and /z/ (voiced fricative) to suggest chaos.
Additional Notes
A fricative is a consonant sound produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together, creating audible friction (e.g., /f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/). In prosody, fricatives contribute to the texture and musicality of verse, often used in alliteration or consonance to create sonic effects. Poets may exploit the hissing quality of sibilant fricatives (like /s/ and /ʃ/) for mood-setting—e.g., in eerie or whispering passages. Fricatives contrast with plosives (which involve a complete closure and release of airflow) and are key in phonetic analysis of poetic rhythm and euphony.
Also Known As
fricative consonant
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