This visual and tactile analogy has frequently been used in describing music.
In its most general musical sense, the term is frequently used in a highly inconsistent fashion. It is variously used to describe vocal and instrumental resources employed, synonymous with timbre and sonority, vertical density and construction of voices and parts, interval spacing within chords, and the nature of monophonic, homophonic, heterophonic, polyphonic and contrapuntal musical constructions.
In electroacoustic music, texture is a highly useful term in describing the character of sounds and various structural levels of sequences of sounds in terms of their overall behaviour and internal details and patternings.
Denis Smalley uses the term, in a pairing in conjunction with Gesture, as a structuring principle of electroacoustic music that is fundamental to his spectromorphological theory.