What do you all mean by "texture"?

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Sometimes I think I know what people mean by it and sometimes I don't. I finally learned it's conventional music theory sense in the last couple years, but sometimes it seems that people (on ILM, for example) are using it in a much vaguer way to simply describe sound qua sound, in music.

― RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 00:54 (twenty-one years ago)

When a lot of people saying texture, what they really mean is timbre. I use it this way sometimes, I'm sure.

― Ian John50n (orion), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 00:57 (twenty-one years ago)

to simply describe sound qua sound, in music

that's how i tend to use it i guess. i think i really mean timbre, as ian says.

― sleep (sleep), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 00:58 (twenty-one years ago)

I use it as shorthand to describe the tones and specifics of music that are otherwise undescribable, either because there is no lexicon for them or because I'm ignorant of said lexicon.

― polyphonic (polyphonic), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 00:59 (twenty-one years ago)

Ian nailed it. People misuse "angular" a lot too.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:04 (twenty-one years ago)

But does "angular" have any traditional definition in musical terms?

― RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:09 (twenty-one years ago)

It would be interesting to do a musicology of "angular," definitely.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:11 (twenty-one years ago)

Angular is shorthand for the type of guitarplay found in prog, math rock, some art/postrock, etc. Very untraditional, unharmonic... you know.

― polyphonic (polyphonic), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:11 (twenty-one years ago)

I suppose that I might misuse the word texture in a strict music theory sort of way, but I never pretend to know much about that. When I say "texture" I mean it more in the literal sense, as though I'm relating the song in terms of a painting or a sculpture.

― Matthew "Flux" Perpetua, Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:13 (twenty-one years ago)

I think I use angular for any drumbeat that doesn't swing.

― Magic City (ano ano), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:13 (twenty-one years ago)

Angular subharmonic texture sounds better through woofers.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:13 (twenty-one years ago)

ned otm

― Magic City (ano ano), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:14 (twenty-one years ago)

People call that guitar music "angular" because it sounds like jagged curves.

I know that I'm not alone in relating music that moves me in visual terms - it's not always meant to be literal, mathematical, or in relationship to musicology.

― Matthew "Flux" Perpetua, Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:15 (twenty-one years ago)

"Angular is shorthand for the type of guitarplay found in prog, math rock, some art/postrock, etc. Very untraditional, unharmonic... you know."

Well, for one, I don't think it's necessarily "unharmonic" as a lot of that music is very tonal, or at least still based on triadic harmony. It's something more specific.

Jagged "curves?"

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:16 (twenty-one years ago)

Matt is mostly OTM in that it doesn't really MATTER if you misuse it according to music theory definitions, but just so you know, "angular" in the music theory sense = preponderance of intervals of a fourth. Woody Shaw was known for his "angular" trumpet solo style, which did this a lot. It does give it a jagged, somewhat dissonant sound.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:17 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm not really complaining about how people use the word. I've just run into confusion when I've tired to use "texture" in the sort of casual sense being discussed here while talking to people who are steeped in music theory.

― RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:18 (twenty-one years ago)

Woody Shaw invented Sonic Youth?

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:18 (twenty-one years ago)

I've used texture the way MattP uses it all the time, even though I er "know better."

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:19 (twenty-one years ago)

Re-EQing your high-end texture crosstalk faders will help immeasurably in preserving the analog tape sound of your subharmonic angular dissonance.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:20 (twenty-one years ago)

So, there was a particular musicologist who coined this term talking about the use of fourths in Woody Shaw?

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:20 (twenty-one years ago)

They should also be calibrated, for maximum surround. xpost

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:20 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm not sure that there was a particular one, but I was planning on being a music major for a little while and at least as far as jazz harmony goes, I'd always been told that intervals of a fourth was a style of "angular" soloing.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

I think "angular" has something to do with rhythm, too. Phillip Glass could have some tonally based thing that used a lot of fourths that wasn't "angular."

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Ned can you engineer my next record?

― Shakey Mo Collier, Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Well I don't think its a catchall for all uses of the 4th as an interval!

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:23 (twenty-one years ago)

I was going to make some sort of Ned and Kevin Shields joke but I couldn't think of one.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:23 (twenty-one years ago)

Shakey Mo, I would need to ensure that the audiophilic ambience is concentrated in a spread of sonic wow and flutter that is captured via a room microphone mounted with a Bigmuff hard disk.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:24 (twenty-one years ago)

2x-post: No, of course not. But using a lot of fourths or odd use of fourths in a tonal context might sound...angular?

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:25 (twenty-one years ago)

That's the way I've always understood it.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:25 (twenty-one years ago)

I remember reading something Anthony Braxton said about wanting to use more large intervals in his soloing instead of relying so much on seconds and thirds.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:27 (twenty-one years ago)

My understanding about the chord progression of Giant Steps is that it had originally just been a tonal excercize for Coltrane, where each chord was as far from the one before it as possible (so is that a fourth? I don't remember, it's been too long. It would be a tritone, but then presumably it would only switch between two chords, so that doesn't make any sense).

I need to find my real book.

― djdee2005 (djdee2005), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:31 (twenty-one years ago)

I think the rhythm aspect has to do with abstraction, i.e., some abstraction in the placement of notes. Maybe people relate this to abstraction in the visual arts being about shapes, hence the term "angular?" Angular suggests angles, though, so, how, Matthew, can it be about curves???

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:38 (twenty-one years ago)

i've seen a fairchild compressor in person!

― lolita corpus (lolitacorpus), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:41 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.courier-journal.com/features/2002/08/photos/20020819_3.jpg

Angular curves?

― RS £aRue (rockist_scientist), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:41 (twenty-one years ago)

I remember reading something Anthony Braxton said about wanting to use more large intervals in his soloing instead of relying so much on seconds and thirds.
-- Tim Ellison (timejeanne...)

i.e., pointillism

― Stormy Davis (diamond), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 01:58 (twenty-one years ago)

I think pointillism is a textural term in music, actually. The most common thing referred to as pointillism is, I believe, Webern. It's about isolated, singular sonic events.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 03:02 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm with Tim about also understanding angularity in terms of rhythm- ie. Deerhoof's timing, Starfucker's timing, The Slits' timing - they all strike me as "angular", and I may just mean something a bit like rushing into changes, forcing the timing, things slanting ahead of themselves, darting or stuttering or feinting away from the expected/established tempo. Could just be me tho . . .

― Drew Daniel (Drew Daniel), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 03:20 (twenty-one years ago)

i think yeah... drew and tim are onto the right direction with angular. at least what i've always understood/misundertood it to be. not necessarily what kind of chord, but the rapid succession of several plunks of one note, then darting left playing several a different one, then right, up, then down, and beyond. and quickness. i guess i think drive by jehu or one of those others in that vein of great san diego savior rock bands. like jet planes doing impossible turns. so rhythm and/or tempo is probably important. sure, you could turn not so often, but i think a good whip snap is needed for a point and an angle.
?

texture to me is about interaction of sounds. yeah, and maybe that's the timbre of a bow string creating a solid dense droning mass or the white walls of noise in shoegaze or a pita track.

but i only know those words in a metaphorical sense. (lot's of liquor, dark corners, and hazy mornings.)
m.

― msp (msp), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 05:24 (twenty-one years ago)

I always thought of texture as a word to describe how something sounded once it had been processed beyond its timbre... eg, in this age of studios and sound modification. A violin would have a timbre to a classical musician, but once it was distorted, filtered, and put through a reverb.... well, we can't really talk about its timbre then as an instrument. So texture sort of encompasses the fact that all recorded music has been processed to some degree or other. But that's just my own personal definition.

― DougD, Tuesday, 25 January 2005 11:30 (twenty-one years ago)

I've always thought of texture in music as the elements that are not concerned with melodic aspects, but exists purely to compliment the primary melodies and harmonies. This of course, is probably wrong.

― darin (darin), Tuesday, 25 January 2005 19:04 (twenty-one years ago)

The usual usage in music theory is that texture relates to what the instruments in an ensemble are doing. There's monophonic texture (in which all of the instruments play the same melody), heterophonic texture (in which instruments play variants of the same melody together, as in traditional Chinese music), polyphonic texture (more than one melody going at the same time), etc.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Wednesday, 26 January 2005 01:22 (twenty-one years ago)

Doug, I think if you're talking about the sound of an instrument, whether it's been electronically processed in a studio or not, you're still talking about timbre.

― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Wednesday, 26 January 2005 01:23 (twenty-one years ago)

seems like all the folks who use "texture" in the non traditional theory/wrong sense are consistent within their own collective definition. seems to me anyway. I'll add that to me it's not necessarily the sound of ONE instrument - that WOULD still be timbre - its more like the sound/ambience of the recording as a whole. I guess that would be like saying it's the timbre of the entire composition rather than of the guitar or the strings...

― AaronK (AaronK), Wednesday, 26 January 2005 04:10 (twenty-one years ago)

nineteen years pass...

I think I have a different (mis?)understanding of texture than was discussed here, so maybe this is for a new/different thread but...

I was listening to Dettinger on headphones earlier, Oasis 6, and there was something weirdly physically painful about it; the only way I can think to describe it is as having a texture - as in, it felt like something solid in my sonic field, something gritty or gravelly. I experience certain Kyuss songs like this. The guitars on Whitewater feel fibrous and dense, like desert wind. I don't *think* this is just projection/but I guess it could be. Certain Autechre songs feel like aurally ingesting very finely ground up glass.

― I would prefer not to. (Chinaski), Tuesday, 20 August 2024 20:06 (one year ago)

In electroacoustic music, texture carries more the connotation of sound masses in the sense of Xenakis and the perception of different layers of sound and their evolution and interplay. i.e. dense, sparse. It extends the traditional meaning of texture but doesn't mean the same thing as timbre, necessarily.

Angular I would understand more as wide, usually stacatto, leaping intervals but I also get Drew's meaning.

― blagobu, Tuesday, 20 August 2024 22:15 (one year ago)

I guess I would call the rhyhmic push-pull thing "jerky" more than "angular" although they often go together.

― blagobu, Tuesday, 20 August 2024 22:22 (one year ago)

To me you have like different guitar tones evoking varying proportions/ densities of mattter like molten metal, dirt, wood, flame, sugar, industrial waste, etc. I don’t know if that’s the same thing.

― brimstead, Wednesday, 21 August 2024 14:47 (one year ago)

In a pop music sense, it refers to what geldof does when he wants to do another crap charity single

― keep kamala and khive on (wins), Wednesday, 21 August 2024 14:50 (one year ago)

...that one took me a second...

― m0stly clean (Slowsquatch), Thursday, 22 August 2024 05:19 (one year ago)

I always thought of texture as a word to describe how something sounded once it had been processed beyond its timbre... eg, in this age of studios and sound modification.

I like this

― Theracane Gratifaction (bendy), Thursday, 22 August 2024 14:57 (one year ago)

I've always thought the slightly out-of-tune horns on Burning Spears' debut was intended to add texture to the songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL3rt6RTqps

― TO BE A JAZZ SINGER YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SCAT (Jazzbo), Thursday, 22 August 2024 15:44 (one year ago)

For me texture is the way the bottom mass of sound moves and is shaped under the impulse of the song, which is best exemplified in genres that manipulate the rawest sonic material and maintain its granularity (noise, noise rock, metal, krautrock), or those who seek to present the listener with a mesh of sound (everything after Kraftwerk, Techno, Autechre, also field recordings). It's linked to structure and rhythm. Music that can make you feel its structure and sonic waves.

― Nabozo, Friday, 23 August 2024 07:53 (one year ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.