What is a texture?
The term originates from a latin word textūra, which means a weaving, web, structure. Widely used across various fields, it often lacks a precise definition and is applied intuitively.
Music theory: the way different sounds or musical elements are combined, ranging from monophonic (single melody) to polyphonic (multiple independent lines).
Visual arts: the perceived or actual surface quality of an artwork, such as roughness, smoothness, or patterns.
Textiles: the feel or appearance of a fabric’s surface, influenced by weave, fiber type, and finish.
Geology: the size, shape, and arrangement of mineral grains in a rock, affecting its structure and classification.
Computer graphics: a 2D image applied to a 3D surface to simulate material details like wood, metal, or stone.
Food: the physical consistency of food, such as crispness, smoothness, or chewiness, affecting sensory perception.
Literature: the layering of language, style, and details that create depth and richness in a written work.
From these definitions, texture can be understood as a structure of multiple elements, often exhibiting self-similarity, randomness, and microstructure. Textural qualities engage multiple senses — vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell — existing at the intersection of conscious and subconscious perception, as well as between noise and information or time and frequency domains.
Sound textures.
My ongoing doctoral research is focused on the perception and synthesis of sound textures. The goal is to develop a parametric model of sound textures that is based on the principles of stochastic generation of granular sound events. The research is conducted at the AGH University of Science and Technology, under the supervision of Dr Marek Pluta.
How to define a sound texture?
It consists of numerous, very short sound events (grains) that are subject to high-level, stochastic organization;
have a homogeneous (quasi-stationary) temporal structure;
and the grains are similar to each other (redundancy) but not identical (randomness).
Sound textures are a very common elements of soundscapes experienced in a daily life.
Nature: rain, stream, sea, fire, wind, rustling leaves, swarms of bees, cicadas, flocks of birds.
City: engine hum, chatter, clinking cutlery in a restaurant, applause, fireworks, popcorn.
Home: refrigerator, washing machine, microwave, fan, typing on a keyboard, printing, vinyl record crackle, cooking, frying a cutlet, dripping faucet.
Musical instruments: idiophones (rattles, cymbals), snare drum, bow.
One proof of their ubiquity is the vast number of words describing their type or quality:
bubbling, dripping, gurgling, splashing, sloshing, swishing, trickling, splattering, flowing, splashing, hissing, buzzing, whirring, rattling, clicking, clattering, grinding, whizzing, creaking, scraping, clinking, ticking, popping, whizzing, clicking, humming, rustling, crackling, fluttering, growling, howling, chirping, wailing, croaking, screeching, cracking, popping...
All that suggests that sound textures are really important part of our everyday life, even if they are not always consciously perceived and remain somehow invisible, in the background. This continous exposure has a great effect on our mood, emotions, and cognitive processes, and it is worth to explore and understand it better. Existing studies, however, are mostly based on a typical, laboratory stimuli, like simple sinusoidal tones or filtered noise, which are far from the complexity of real-world soundscapes.
My research aims to bridge this gap by developing a parametric model of sound textures which could answer the questions about the importance of underlying physical qualities, like density, randomness or average grains' shape, and how they compare to the recognized context of such sounds. And then, what are the fundamentals of esthetic preferences for certain textures, how to make cars, cities or home appliances sound less disturbing, how to better design sounds for enhancing relaxation or concentration, and explore this new possibilities for sound design and creating new musical instrments.