Justin Vernon’s voice is one of the most recognizable instruments in indie music. Illustration by Mikkel Sommer

Singing in falsetto is, by definition, a kind of false projection into the world. About a decade ago, when Justin Vernon, the principal member of Bon Iver, was recording the songs that became the band’s début album, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” he realized that ranging just above his usual register made it easier to sing about memories that were otherwise too painful to recount. Vernon’s falsetto caused an obvious strain on his voice, making it sound weary and brittle. His recordings gave the impression of someone forcing himself to venture far outside his comfort zone; they communicated a sense of solitude and drift, even if, as was often the case, you couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying.

“For Emma,” which was released in 2007, became the type of album that fans believe has magical, healing qualities, an aura that had something to do with the record’s glum backstory. Vernon had lived the kind of quaint, rooted existence that seems increasingly rare, given the cosmopolitan ambitions of most professional musicians. Born and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Vernon moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, with some friends, to try to make it as a band. Within a year, about a quarter of which Vernon spent bedridden with mononucleosis and then with a liver infection, his relationship with his bandmates and a girlfriend were in shambles. He retreated to his father’s cabin, in the woods of Wisconsin, where, after spending a few weeks drinking beer and watching movies, he picked up his acoustic guitar, wrote some songs that reflected his bleak, wintry surroundings, and began experimenting with new ways of singing them.

The odd thing about Vernon’s music, which fans related to because of its folksy vulnerability, was how much he withheld. His songs felt authentic and intimate, yet they were filled with invented places and characters, private symbols, and impressionistic scraps of language. Emma wasn’t a person, he explained, but a foggy, wallowing state of mind. Do we listen to a musician’s melancholy songs because we want him to feel better, or because it’s comforting to know that people who are famous and accomplished don’t have it all figured out, either? Vernon followed “For Emma” with “Bon Iver, Bon Iver” (2011), a Grammy-winning album of exquisite, forlorn chamber pop. This time, he was surrounded by a band, which included his longtime collaborators the percussionists Matt McCaughan and Sean Carey, the saxophonist Michael Lewis, and the guitarist Mike Noyce. The pained vocals, the pastoral arrangements: Vernon seemed to have perfected a studied approach to writing and singing sad songs.

Vernon’s voice has become one of the most recognizable instruments in indie music, and not just on his own albums. During Bon Iver’s frequent hiatuses, Vernon has recorded and toured with Gayngs, a largely Midwestern supergroup devoted to eighties soft rock, and Volcano Choir, a Wisconsin rock band that specializes in a kind of chugging, open-road ambience. He has lent his falsetto to the supple synth-pop of Poliça and to the downcast electronic balladry of James Blake. But his most famous collaborator—and the one whose influence resounds through Bon Iver’s new album, “22, A Million”—is Kanye West. Several years ago, West became enamored of “Woods,” an unusual Bon Iver track that Vernon sang through Auto-Tune, and invited him to collaborate on his 2010 album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” West recently called Vernon his “favorite living artist.”

Earlier this year, Vernon and West made guest appearances on “Friends,” a song by Francis and the Lights, which featured Vernon, West, and Francis singing through Prismizer, a software program that, like Auto-Tune or the vocoder, makes sounds bright and syrupy. Melodies pulse and glow, supposedly following the dispersive properties of a prism. After fiddling with Francis’s Prismizer, Vernon enlisted his engineer, Chris Messina, to tweak the software. Eventually, Messina created the Messina, a combination of software and gear that is capable of harmonizing voices and instruments live. (The success of the first two Bon Iver albums has allowed Vernon to make investments in and around Eau Claire: he set up April Base, the studio Messina oversees, became part-owner of a boutique hotel, and helped found an annual summer music festival.)

“22, A Million” is an astonishing and strange album, the sound of a man trying to figure out what he can make once he has broken a kaleidoscope into its constituent slivers. Mostly, it feels like an attempt to erase the flesh-and-bone authenticity that made Vernon into an icon. Vernon’s falsetto is still identifiable through the digital scrim, but now the words wobble beyond his control. Sometimes it sounds like a one-man gospel chorus; at other times as if it came from a distant crater. Vernon’s lyrics suggest narrative episodes, or glimpses into someone else’s intimacy: fragments of an argument, a quick peek into a room at the Ace Hotel, bundling “your sister” into a cab, hallucinations in fields of tall reeds, a cry for help to his own personal “A-Team.” “I’d be as happy as hell if you’d stay for tea,” he sings on “33 ‘GOD,’ ” with a kind of glistening desperation whose context we can’t quite grasp.

When Bon Iver first emerged, Vernon seemed like an artist from the past transported to the present, his selfies rendered as daguerreotypes. But the ready-made idioms of folk and rock that inspired his first couple of albums are no longer sufficient. Instead, “22,” which makes generous use of the Messina, is filled with a sense of adventure and mischief that his older works seemed too serious to indulge. It’s an attempt at a new language, as evidenced by the album’s unusual song titles and hip-hop-inspired approach to production. “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” and “33 ‘GOD’ ” are built on crunchy digital drum programs. Samples abound: one, of Stevie Nicks singing “Wild Heart,” is sped up to a high-pitched squiggle; in another, the Scottish pop singer Paolo Nutini belts out a line about finding God and religion, making plain Vernon’s riddle-like yearning; elsewhere, he weaves an Eau Claire radio jingle into a synth line, a nod to the locals.

Throughout, Vernon tests the limits of the Messina. One of the album’s most startling tracks, “_\_45_____,” is a duel between Vernon’s voice and Lewis’s saxophone. The sax is fed through the synthesizer, where it’s sped up and slowed down before settling into a gorgeous flutter. On “715 - CR∑∑KS,” Vernon’s sentences dissolve into digital purrs. There are no other instruments, just Vernon cooing and pulsing and raging against the Messina, trying to outrace the imperative of harmony. A patch of static almost scratches out the words “alimony butterfly” on “29 #Strafford APTS,” a song built on acoustic guitar, piano, strings, and Vernon’s untreated voice, which feels almost too raw to leave out in the open.

Speech synthesizers often make a song sound as though someone were running a leaky fluorescent highlighter across its lyrics. There are those who think that mediating voices through technology is somehow inauthentic, that when we sand away the coarse edges of our voices, or speak into boxes that make us sound like robots, we lose touch with what makes us human. Rock music has generally remained hostile to these kinds of innovations. But there’s nothing particularly natural about a singer’s murmur or a soft cry rising above a full band. These, too, come out of recording studios, and are tricks of signal processing and amplification.