Some music consists only of a melody. Other times music may consist of a melody with drums, or a melody and harmony, or several melodies all at once. These are examples of different textures. As the metaphor suggests, textures describe how different melodies are woven around each other, as well as their importance and relative roles.

Musicians can describe textures in many different ways--sometimes they may use such adjectives as "dense" or "sparse"--but two major categories of textures are important. The most common is a homophonic texture. This type of texture consists of a single melody that has the focus, and this melody is accompanied by other chords or melodies that create harmony.

A polyphonic texture also has multiple melodies, but, unlike homophony, no one of them always has the focus. A round, such as "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," is an example of imitative polyphony. The same melody repeats at an offset in time, or is imitated we might say, so that no one of the melodies is the singular focus of our attention. This sequence from Jaws is accompanied by a fugue, a kind of piece with an imitative polyphonic texture.

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