In music, heterophony is a type of texture create through the simultaneous variation of a melodic line. This can refer to a kind of complex monophony in which there is only one basic melody, but realized at the same time in multiple voices, each of which play the melody differently, either in a different rhythm or tempo, or with various embellishments and elaborations. The term (originally coined by Plato) was initially introduced into systematic musicology as a subcategory of polyphonic music, though is now regarded as a textural category in its own right.