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 S

Suling

Musical Instrument
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 traditional Indonesian bamboo flute producing a soft, breathy tone, often evoked in poetry for its meditative, ethereal sound.

Detailed Definition
The suling’s gentle melodies appear in Javanese and Balinese poetry to symbolize pastoral calm, spiritual introspection, and gamelan integration; its use in tembang (sung poetry) links it to themes of emotional nuance and lyrical subtlety in Southeast Asian verse.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Javanese poetry, the suling’s breathy tones evoke moonlit rice fields and quiet longing; A Sundanese folk verse compares a lover’s sigh to the suling’s melancholic flute notes; Contemporary Indonesian poets describe the suling as “the voice of the wind through bamboo”; In a poem by Taufiq Ismail, the suling’s melody weaves through memories of childhood in West Java; Modern poets use the suling as a symbol of cultural resilience amid urban noise; A Balinese poem likens the suling’s circular breathing to the eternal cycle of life and death.
Additional Notes
The suling is an Indonesian end-blown bamboo flute used in gamelan and folk music, producing a soft, breathy tone with subtle ornamentation; its pentatonic melodies evoke Javanese and Balinese landscapes—poets might reference it to explore meditative stillness, the breath as spiritual conduit, or the flute’s role in ritual narratives like wayang kulit shadow puppetry.
Also Known As
Indonesian bamboo flute
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