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For these two sentences:

  1. He spoke at the microphone.
  2. He spoke into the microphone.

, are they the same, or is one more poetic than the other?

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  1. The ordinary idiom is 'speak into the microphone'. Occasionally you will find a voice professional or sound engineer talk about 'speaking across the mic' (which is a technique for avoiding 'pop' or for dealing with an unusual mic setup) or encouraging an amateur to 'speak to the mic', meaning to speak as if the mic were a human listener. 'Speak at the mic' addresses the position at which the speaker stands.

  2. In contemporary English 'poetic' is not usually a desirable stylistic quality. When ordinary people today speak of 'poetic' language what they usually have in mind is language marked by a high degree of sonic patterning, by conventional metaphor, and by a highly emotional tone. But English poetry itself abandoned the use of a distinctly 'poetic' diction more than a century ago, and this sort of language is now generally regarded as self-indulgent or meretricious. When sophisticated critics speak approvingly of 'poetic' qualities they are more likely to mean that a passage is intellectually and emotionally complex and suggests far more than it explicitly says.

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    To me, 'speak at the microphone' sounds like a public meeting. The guest speaker speaks, then the mc invites questions from the audience. One audience member has a loud voice and can be heard by everyone. Another has a soft voice and the mc invites him to come to the front and speak at the microphone.
    – Sydney
    Sep 26, 2014 at 23:44
  • @SydneyAustraliaESLTeacher A very good point I should not have overlooked.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Sep 27, 2014 at 0:30
  • Just like @SydneyAustraliaESLTeacher , I also feel that "speak at the microphone" sounds like a public meeting, and more specifically, sounds like "speak at the podium" where there might not be a podium, or the podium has a microphone.
    – Selali Adobor
    Sep 27, 2014 at 3:50
  • I think native speakers can infer what speak at the microphone (might) mean, but it's not an expression we would actually use. Go up to the mic/podium and speak, or Use the mic to speak, or Speak with a/the mic might be more idiomatic.
    – user6951
    Sep 27, 2014 at 15:37
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1. This is NOT common. It sounds like it could mean either:
a) He spoke towards the microphone
b) He spoke being in the location of the microphone.

2. This IS common. This means:
He spoke projecting his voice towards the inside of the microphone(which is where sound is processed in the microphone).

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