How to Use polyphonic in a Sentence

polyphonic

adjective

• The novel those memories inspired is polyphonic, with circles of time and points of view that feel like the music.
  — Danielle A. Jackson, Vulture, 21 May 2021
• Wu Wei, who plays a polyphonic woodwind instrument called the shen.
  — George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune, 4 July 2021
• And while the language may be at risk for extinction, its polyphonic hymns have preserved it in amber.
  — Melanie Hamilton, CNN, 16 Dec. 2021
• The score is stunning in its variety, in both solo and polyphonic writing.
  — James R. Oestreich, New York Times, 5 May 2017
• For the last few days, my social-media feeds—which, most of the time, read like bleak, polyphonic litanies of the falling-apart world—have been overwhelmed instead by discourse about the sandwich.
  — Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2019
• In all her essays, Kahanoff looked for a place to call home, where her polyphonic identity would find peace and where the East and the West would have a fertile conversation.
  — New York Times, 16 Apr. 2022
• The effect is vibrantly polyphonic: On the banners, big, dark characters float and pulsate over dense fields of smaller, lighter ones.
  — Holland Cotter, New York Times, 31 Mar. 2016
• Until very recently, the slider phone was a thing of the past, consigned to the annals of history along with polyphonic ringtones and BlackBerry’s scroll wheel.
  — Jon Porter, The Verge, 1 Nov. 2018
• Instead, Smith offers an idea in a contemplative way: a polyphonic passage, a drone or a melody that starts, pauses and repeats with a slight but crucial change.
  — New York Times, 13 July 2022
• The polyphonic narrative that ensues has the pacing and urgency of a spy thriller but the middling stakes of a book about a group of privileged kids sending each other cryptic texts.
  — Rebekah Frumkin, Washington Post, 6 Sep. 2019
• The balanced and well-blended choir of 17 voices offered both luminous hymns and polyphonic passages evoking holy dread.
  — Dallas News, 2 Apr. 2022
• Set in the future amid a pandemic far worse than our own, this polyphonic novel reflects our human desire to find meaning within tragedy.
  — Amy Brady, Scientific American, 16 Dec. 2021
• The beguiling psychedelia of these polyphonic Parisians has percolated through France’s music scene since their debut album in 2013.
  — Efrain Dorado, RedEye Chicago, 17 Oct. 2017
• The absence compels you to read the whole thing in sequence, to regard it as a polyphonic magnum opus tilting at the monoculture, born under Bush I and stretching into Clinton’s second term.
  — Ed Park, The New York Review of Books, 14 Mar. 2023
• Above all, these projects are collaborative, emerging from a polyphonic exchange of ideas.
  — Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 15 Nov. 2021
• Perhaps this is why a polyphonic and democratic approach to such collecting seems fitting.
  — Sophie Haigney, The New Yorker, 4 Oct. 2021
• Jazz has long served as one of the models for his contentious literary pluralism, a polyphonic exchange that might sound disorderly to the uninitiated but which gives all soloists their break.
  — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 19 July 2021
• The brief orchestral fantasia mixes together snippets from three folk songs in a polyphonic blend.
  — Tim Diovanni, Dallas News, 16 Apr. 2021
• And by swirling together polyphonic influences with a hands-across-the-world message, the people that Coldplay’s music presumes to lift up are at risk of being reduced to a singular, suffering mass.
  — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 26 Nov. 2019
• The dissonance between the notes in their traditional polyphonic arrangement jars with the measured, uniform stream of figures marching along the wall, which might be hypnotic, almost soothing, if not for the voices in the room.
  — Vogue, 12 Jan. 2018
• Today a musician can create any type of sound response (and keep in mind that an instrument is more than just sounds) while using any type of controller (albeit there is still work to be done to create a good polyphonic midi guitar).
  — IEEE Spectrum, 14 Jan. 2023
• In Lance Olsen’s latest, the master of literary montage composes a kinetic, polyphonic novel of 1920s Berlin.
  — WSJ, 24 Jan. 2020
• The Berklee College of Music alum keenly combines dancehall vibes and a pop structure with the textures of her native island country, including Malagasy lyrics and polyphonic vocal layers.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 14 Apr. 2021
• For a classic do-it-all polyphonic synthesizer, Behringer’s new DeepMind 12 offers massive flexibility and a plethora of unmistakable sounds that harken back to the 80’s.
  — Popular Science, 26 May 2020
• On the program were selections from the Peterhouse partbooks, a treasure trove of pre-Reformation polyphonic vocal music that at the time was virtually unknown.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 25 Oct. 2019
• The director complicates the scenario by making the boxer fall in lover with the ballerina as well, creating a polyphonic romantic melodrama.
  — Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 30 May 2018
• In the late 1980s, under Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia developed a vital, polyphonic media, heading into the waning days of Soviet communism.
  — Kenneth Rapoza, Forbes, 12 July 2022
• There have been multiple studies placing human singers into MRIs to monitor the mechanics at play, including showcasing polyphonic singing and how the larynx changes to produce different singing styles.
  — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 24 Jan. 2020
• Gotham’s stellar early-music choir celebrates things French this season, specifically the genius of Guillaume de Machaut, the fourteenth-century polyphonic master.
  — The New Yorker, 9 Jan. 2017
• Billops initially set out to document her niece Suzanne’s recovery from heroin addiction, but the film became a polyphonic account of domestic violence in a middle-class black household.
  — Phoebe Chen, The New York Review of Books, 27 June 2020

Last Updated: 1 Aug 2024