Question

How are polyphonic and homophonic textures different from monophonic?

Answer 1

Hint: You may recall that texture of a musical note determines the quality of the sound of that piece along with determining how melodic, harmonic and rhythmic that note is. After understanding that the given terms are directly related to musical notes define each of them one by one. Thus, using these definitions, one could differentiate the given terms.

Complete solution:
In the question, we are asked how the monophonic textures different from polyphonic and homophonic textures.

You may already know that the music we listen to comprises more than a melodic line. We call the overall effect caused by playing several musical instruments together as textures.
Monophonic textures are the music consisting of a single melodic line. It has neither harmony nor counterpoint and sounds the same at the same time irrespective whether played or sung, by a single voice or a group of voices, performed with a single instrument or set of them. An example to this texture is a person whistling a tune.

When some music has many notes at once, we refer to that music as a homophonic texture. They are known to have a clear melodic line that draws our attention and all the remaining parts just provides accompaniment to it.

The web of autonomous melodies is termed as polyphonic textures. Each melody provides the texture as well as harmony of the piece but could also be defined as a separate independent strand of music.

Thus we have differentiated monophonic textures from homophonic and polyphonic textures with the help of their definitions.

Note:
One should not that most pieces cannot be categorized into just one of these textures. Other than three we have two more textures that are very common, namely, homo-rhythmic and hetero-phonic. We often define texture in terms of density, thickness, width between lowest and highest pitches, etc.