[3][7] In fact, Richard Hoppin regarded voice exchange as "the basic device from which the Notre Dame composers evolved ways of organizing and integrating the simultaneous melodies of polyphony,"[8] and of considerable importance as a means of symmetry and design in polyphonic music as well as starting point for more complex contrapuntal devices.
[6] The importance was not lost on theorists of the time, either, as Johannes de Garlandia gave an example, which he called "repetitio diverse vocis," and noted in "three- and four-part organa, and conductus, and in many other things.
[2] In the genre rondellus, as described by the theorist Walter Odington (c. 1300), the central part of the piece was based entirely on voice exchange.
[4] However, it occasionally made limited appearances in simple polyphony of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was, for example, common in the upper parts of Baroque trio sonatas.
In this sense, it is a common secondary structural feature found in the music of a wide variety of composers.