In aesthetic terms, the category of 'sound' is often split in two: 'noise', which is chaotic, unfamiliar, and offensive; and 'music', which is harmonious, resonant, and divine. These opposing concepts are brought together in the phenomenon of Noise Music, but how do practitioners make sense of this apparent discordance? Analyses that treat recorded media as primary texts declare Noise Music to be a failure, as a genre without progress. These paint Noise as a polluted form in an antagonistic relationship with traditional music. But while critiques often point to indeterminate structure as indicative of the aesthetic project's limitations, we claim that indeterminacy itself becomes central to meaningful expression when the social context of Noise is considered. Through observational and interview data, we consider the contexts, audiences, and producers of contemporary American Noise Music. Synthesizing the performance theories of Hennion and Alexander, we demonstrate how indeterminacy situated in structured interaction allows for meaning-making and sustains a musical form based in claims to inclusion, access, and creative freedom. We show how interaction, not discourse, characterizes the central performance that constructs the meaning of Noise.

Sociologists have yet to theorize interactions with sonic materiality. In this article I introduce an analytical concept for the observation of interactions with sound. Sound has material effects in all situations. But the audibility of sonic objects is a relation of situated actors to material arrangements. Sonic object settings are dynamic material arrangements in which sonic qualities emerge for interpretation. The concept synthesizes research on sonic materiality, audibility, and interaction. After outlining the concept, I present an empirical illustration from an audio firm's R&D laboratory arranged to support a new technology called object-based audio. I observed engineers conducting two concurrent but contrasting experiments; results indicate how settings both enable and constrain the interpretation of sound.

Sociologists of education tend to emphasize external goods over internal goods, that is, the goods that result from a certain practice rather than the goods intrinsic to the practice itself. A distinction between kinds of goods allows sociologists to distinguish education for skills from education for virtues and education for habits. Skills produce external goods while habits and virtues produce internal goods, though in distinct ways, with virtues more related to a specific vision of the good and habits more open to different forms of growth. A distinction between these three forms of practice—skills, habitus, and virtues—can help sociologists recognize and study different forms of goods in schools, better empowering them to examine alienation and the relationship between power and morality. Distinguishing kinds of goods can be helpful in a wide range of sociological subfields, especially education, helping sociologists move beyond a predominant focus on stratified socio-economic outcomes.

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Sociologists of education often emphasize goods that result from a practice (external goods) rather than goods intrinsic to a practice (internal goods). The authors draw from John Dewey and Alasdair MacIntyre to describe how the same practice can be understood as producing “skills” that center external goods or as producing habits (Dewey) or virtues (MacIntyre), both of which center internal goods. The authors situate these concepts within sociology of education’s stratification paradigm and a renewed interest in the concept of alienation, contrasting the concepts of skills, habits, and virtues to capital, credentials, and habitus. They close by connecting the argument to broader critiques of procedural liberalism and the ideology of meritocracy, then giving suggestions for an expanded sociology of education beyond the stratification paradigm.