Know your textures

The aim of these activities is to:

• Sing with good tuning and tone
• Sing a range of songs with different textures and experience singing both melody and harmony
• Compose or arrange a short piece of music with different textures in it – these could be for voices or instruments or a combination. 
• Develop your understanding and knowledge of a range of textures such as monophonic, homophonic, polyphonic and imitative (including round/canon) and recognise them in pieces of music.

Listen:
Sing Up has a range of songs that introduce the textures: monophonic, polyphonic and homophonic. These songs (available to Members) introduce the textures both in the lyrics but also in how the music is written.

Monophonic has one melodic line and no harmony. It could be sung by one voice or lots of voices in unison
Homophonic has one clear melody while everything else fills in the chords, harmony, rhythm
Polyphonic has more than one melody happening at the same time 

Sing:
Your next task is to work your way through learning to sing songs with different textures. Musical texture is best experienced through singing and playing music. Here are some suggestions to sing:

Songs in unison e.g. Rise, Eye of the tiger

Songs that are in a round e.g. Laudate Deum

Songs in parts e.g. Ain't gonna let nobody

Listening and appraising:
Now you’ve sung different types of songs think about the textures they each had. Listen to a variety of songs and music and see if you can find examples of:

Music where:

1. There is only one melody, nothing else
2. A song that starts monophonic (one melody) but becomes polyphonic (several melodies)
3. A song that is in parts but the parts are homophonic (in harmony, moving together)
4. A song with only one melody but the melody is used in multiple voices creating a polyphonic texture
5. A song that is polyphonic with multiple melodies
6. A song with only one melody (unison)
7. A song where parts imitate each other
8. A song that has all three textures