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 P

Parole

Philosophy
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

Parole is the individual, concrete act of speech or writing. It is the personal, creative use of language in a specific utterance, distinct from the system of langue.

Detailed Definition
Saussure's distinction places parole as the performance. In poetry, the poem is a unique parole, a new utterance made from the langue. The poet's art lies in the specific choice and arrangement of words. Each poem is a fresh, unrepeatable act of language, transforming the abstract system into concrete meaning. This emphasizes the poet's creativity and the event-like nature of the poetic text.
Example
Example in poetry:
A specific poem, like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," is a unique parole, a specific act of speech using the English language; The individual voice of a poet, such as the unique style of Emily Dickinson, is their parole; Every performance of a poem is a new parole, a unique event in language; A poet's particular choice of words in a single line is an act of parole, a creative instantiation of the langue.
Additional Notes
Parole, in Saussure's structural linguistics, is the individual, concrete act of speaking or writing. It is the personal, creative use of the language system (langue) in a specific utterance. Parole is the event of language, the performance, whereas langue is the abstract rule-governed system. In poetry, every poem is a unique act of parole, a new and unrepeatable utterance that draws upon the langue. The poet's art lies in the specific, creative choices they make—the particular words, syntax, and rhythm they select. This concept emphasizes the poet's agency and originality, showing that poetry is a fresh act of creation within the larger linguistic system, transforming the potential of langue into the actuality of a poem.
Also Known As
Individual speech act Utterance Performance (linguistic)
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