Texture is the term used to refer to the way the various sounds and melodic lines occurring together in music interact or blend with one another. The word is adopted from textiles, where it refers to the weave of the various threads — loose or tight, even or mixed. A cloth such as tweed or denim, for instance, leaves the different threads clearly visible. In fine silk the weave is so tight and smooth that the threads are almost impossible to detect.

Thinking again of the pitch/time graph on page 24, we can see that it is possible to plot more than one pitch for every time slot. Melody exists in the horizontal dimension, from left to right; texture in the vertical dimension, from top to bottom. (For the moment, we leave the lower dots below the melody unconnected.)