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 M

Musical Underscoring

Performance
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

Soft music played beneath a spoken poem. It supports atmosphere or rhythm without replacing the poem’s own sound.

Detailed Definition
Musical underscoring places instrumental or electronic music beneath a poetry reading to shape mood, pacing, and dramatic development. A sparse piano pattern may support an elegy, while percussion can reinforce a poem’s urgency or drive. The music should leave space for consonants, silence, and changes in vocal intensity, since poetry depends on listeners hearing individual words. Effective underscoring responds to the poem’s structure and avoids instructing the audience too obviously what to feel.
Example
Example in poetry:
A cellist plays sustained, quiet notes beneath a poem about winter, stopping before the final line so the ending lands in silence; A poet reading a love poem uses gentle guitar chords only between stanzas, allowing the voice to remain the main focus; For a poem about war, a low drum rhythm begins softly and grows more urgent as the poem's images intensify; In a performance of Langston Hughes's "The Weary Blues," blues-inspired accompaniment can help audiences hear the musical world evoked by the poem
Additional Notes
Musical underscoring can create atmosphere, tension, or pulse beneath a reading. Keep it low enough for every word to remain intelligible, and coordinate musical changes with the poem’s shifts.
Also Known As
Underscore Background Music Incidental Music
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