In this seminar we inquire into the myriad sonic and musical processes and activities through which people appropriate cultural materials and practices and are socialized in their seemingly mundane daily lives and interactions with mass culture. Drawing on recent work in sound studies and practice theory, as well as on the history, ethnography, and philosophy of sound and music, we consider a number of related issues: 1) processes of appropriation and personalization of mass cultural objects and technologies; 2) personal uses of music and sound in everyday life, in the pursuit of social functionality, relationships, identity, and so on; 3) strategic deployments of the flexible relations between music, language, sound, and silence 4) practices of listening; 5) the way that experience, ideology, and action are conditioned by sonic environments; and 6) the way that these strategic deployments of sound and music necessarily participate in state and mass cultural uses of sound, music, and acoustic design for control and socialization. We consider historical and contemporary case studies in the Middle East, Europe, East Asia, North America, and elsewhere.