Paraphony is the property of an electronic musical instrument that can produce multiple notes or voices, but falls short of being truly polyphonic

Polyphony (instrument)

Polyphony Instruments that are not capable of polyphony are monophonic.-Synthesizer:Most of early synthesizers were monophonic musical instruments which can play only one note at a time, and are often called monosynth as opposed to polysynth...

 because the voices are not fully independent since they share at least one common element. For example, there might be just one single filter

Voltage-controlled filter

A voltage-controlled filter is a filter whose operating characteristics can be controlled by means of a control voltage applied to one or more inputs...

 working on all voices collectively rather than the one filter per voice of truly polyphonic instruments; or there might be only one envelope generator.

One well-known paraphonic synth is the Korg Poly-800

Korg Poly-800

The Korg Poly-800 is a synthesizer released by Korg in 1983. Its initial list price of $795 made it the first fully programmable synthesizer that sold for less than $1000. It featured a 49 key non-velocity sensitive keyboard, two buttons for data entry, and a joystick controller, which could...

, which had 8 oscillators

Electronic oscillator

An electronic oscillator is an electronic circuit that produces a repetitive electronic signal, often a sine wave or a square wave. They are widely used in innumerable electronic devices...

and could produce 8 voices (or 4 2-oscillator voices), but had just one filter.