This module considers the changing role of music within social and cultural practices, its varied relationships with selfhood, media and technology, bodies, everyday lives and social power. In surveying the ways music is and has been bound up in social and cultural formations, the module engages with a range of theoretical issues about how music `works' as well as exploring some of the ways organised sound can be said to `mean' in differing contexts. The module also introduces students to an eclectic range of writings and questions about music in social life, considering questions about the materiality of sound, musical communities, performance, media and affect, positioning such issues in relation to music's production, circulation and consumption.