One of the first classes I signed up for in college was Music Appreciation, and my professor was truly a gifted teacher. Every week he would bring his large collection of instruments to class and use them to demonstrate musical concepts that would have been abstract and disembodied otherwise. Words like timbre and tempo, major and minor, chord and cadence, transformed from terms with lifeless definitions to sensory experiences that I could see, hear, and feel.

One day, my music professor played short sections of two different melodies on the piano, then played a recording of the following classical music piece by J.S. Bach to explain polyphony, a musical texture in which these two different melodies play at the same time in relationship to each other. Take a listen:

The two melodies I first heard played as independent entities now intersected in time, their pitches and rhythms departing and colliding again, flirting with each other in a delicate dance, each making greater sense of the other. Following their relationship with each other in the flow of time was an intellectual puzzle, a physical sensation, and an emotional journey, and it was made possible by texture.[…]

Source: Texture: Finding Character and Story in Music | Joy in Motion