How to Use vocoder in a Sentence

vocoder

noun
  • Zedd mans the keys and the vocoder while Grey handle guitar and drums.
    — Kat Bein, Billboard, 22 May 2018
  • There’s this piece of music in Blonde where Warren’s singing into a vocoder.
    — Vulture, 11 May 2022
  • When this song came out, people criticized its use of vocoder, but nothing could stop its meteoric rise on the charts.
    — Kat Bein, Billboard, 22 Feb. 2021
  • The use of vocoder fosters a discourse on performance, artifice, and camp.
    — Angelica Frey, JSTOR Daily, 9 Aug. 2025
  • Ambiguous lyrical mantras float through raspy vocoders toward a glitchy, percussive hook.
    — Kat Bein, Billboard, 13 Aug. 2019
  • Madonna sings through a vocoder as Blanco thrashes around a circle of judges, newly dressed in saintly garb.
    — Stephen Daw, Billboard, 7 June 2019
  • From there, the spectrogram is then turned into actual speech by a vocoder based on WaveNet.
    — Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 8 Jan. 2018
  • Martin spent the set switching among the saxophone, synths, the vocoder and doing live production.
    — Nereya Otieno, Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 2023
  • Alaska in Winter is Brandon Bethancourt, who does downbeat pop tunes with lots and lots and lots of vocoder.
    — Jake Swearingen, WIRED, 9 Oct. 2007
  • Her voice, brimming with layers of rich vocoder notes, mournfully tries to make sense of the passing, while also acknowledging the end of her friend’s pain.
    — Stephen Daw, Billboard, 23 June 2023
  • Stripping the layers away, listeners hear human voices behind the vocoders, the vocoders that are used to create robot voices.
    — Jem Aswad, Variety, 12 May 2023
  • Cudo and Violent Bear will fill you with indie rock vibes and Rubeo will perform his brand of electro-pop, with keys and a vocoder.
    — Chris Haghirian, kansascity, 5 Mar. 2018
  • Flight Facilities‘ original has an almost irresistible vocoder vocal hook that seemed perfect for a dance floor rod.
    — Billboard Staff, Billboard, 9 July 2021
  • Tate and her dancers seesaw in pink two-pieces and sneakers, executing some pop-girl choreography befitting the bubblegum vocoder vocals and dance beat.
    — Zoe Guy, Vulture, 27 Oct. 2023
  • His compositions can mix electronic sounds with acoustic ones—drum machines, drum kits, multiple layers of droning synths, piano, vocoder.
    — Vogue, 4 Dec. 2020
  • Drawing upon the vocoder’s association with the otherworldly, Stevens spends much of the record running his voice through machines.
    — Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 8 June 2017
  • Lead singer Shun Ikegai used a vocoder to fold his voice into the electro layers of sound, creating a spacey, deep, and sometimes menacing atmosphere.
    — Rob Schwartz, Billboard, 1 Aug. 2017
  • The emotion here, teetering between overwrought and genuinely moving, comes filtered through jangling guitar, heavy reverb, and vocoder.
    — E.r. Pulgar, Pitchfork, 10 Mar. 2026
  • At their energetic live shows, Short pulls off the gargantuan task of playing guitar, singing, manning the vocoder, drum machines, sequencer and sampler.
    — Audrey Gibbs, Nashville Tennessean, 16 Apr. 2025
  • The vocoder started out as a tool for masking, but in the decades since, it’s developed into a tool for revealing what might otherwise remain hidden, aurally or culturally.
    — Angelica Frey, JSTOR Daily, 9 Aug. 2025
  • The rest of Random Access Memories 10th Anniversary bonus tracks include outtakes, early versions, demos, and vocoder tests of songs that both made and didn’t make the final track list.
    — Kory Grow, Rolling Stone, 12 May 2023
  • There’s a way to use vocoder and elicit emotion—see Bon Iver or Rosalía—but MORI’s technique shrinks the warmth of his bari-bass to a barely intelligible mumble.
    — E.r. Pulgar, Pitchfork, 10 Mar. 2026
  • And plenty of fans are furious that Childers has embraced studio bells and whistles — there’s vocoder and drum loops on some songs — and is no longer singing exclusively about hardscrabble Appalachian life à la his 2017 debut Purgatory.
    — Jonathan Bernstein, Rolling Stone, 4 Aug. 2025
  • Following the release of their debut album, the United States of America broke up, but Byrd continued to make music, including 1969’s The American Metaphysical Circus, featuring his early use of both the synthesizer and vocoder.
    — Daniel Kreps, Rolling Stone, 13 Dec. 2025
  • Originally a military device usually employed to disguise military transmissions, the vocoder was adopted by musicians with heavy investments in types of futurism, including Kraftwerk, Stevie Wonder, Devo, Jean-Michel Jarre, Cabaret Voltaire, and Laurie Anderson.
    — Angelica Frey, JSTOR Daily, 9 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'vocoder.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: