Within the Samaveda corpus, the Saṁhitā stands as a carefully ordered collection of verses adapted for melodic chanting in ritual. Almost all of its roughly 1,875 mantras are drawn from the Ṛgveda, especially from certain maṇḍalas, but they are reshaped for singing, with musical modifications and notations. The text is divided into two principal parts: the Pūrvārcika, an earlier collection of verses, and the Uttarārcika, a later one. The Pūrvārcika arranges verses for melodic use, while the Uttarārcika organizes additional chants by their ritual context, especially in Soma sacrifices. In this way, the Saṁhitā functions less as a doctrinal treatise and more as a liturgical chant-book, whose very structure reflects the needs of sacrificial performance.

The Brāhmaṇa layer of the Samaveda takes these chants and embeds them within a detailed ritual and theological framework. It is preserved in several texts, notably the Pañcaviṁśa (Tāṇḍya) Brāhmaṇa with its twenty‑five chapters and the Ṣaḍviṁśa Brāhmaṇa as a supplementary twenty‑sixth book, as well as the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa. These works are composed largely in prose and are organized according to specific sacrifices, especially the Soma rites and other solemn śrauta rituals. They explain how particular sāmans are to be used, at what point in the ceremony, and by which priest, while also offering mythological and symbolic justifications for these procedures. In doing so, they serve as both ritual manuals and theological commentaries, revealing how the sacrifice is understood to mirror and sustain the cosmic order.

The Āraṇyaka texts associated with the Samaveda mark a shift from external performance toward inward contemplation of the same sacred material. Chief among them is the Jaiminīya (Talavakāra) Āraṇyaka, with related material that stands at the threshold between Brāhmaṇa and Āraṇyaka. These works retain a concern for the chants and rites, yet reinterpret them symbolically and meditatively, treating the sacrifice as an inner process involving breath, mind, and consciousness. They explore correspondences between chant and life‑force, altar and body, ritual sound and the structure of the cosmos, and in doing so they prepare the ground for Upaniṣadic reflection. Within this contemplative milieu, themes such as the relation of ātman and brahman and the meditation on sacred sound emerge as a more interiorized counterpart to the earlier ritual focus.