My little desk-computer has a pretty dirty audio path. I can turn up the audio to hear the chirps of the power regulators over the speakers; when the CPU is leaning on the PSU. Even just keystrokes in my editor cause a flurry of chirps as the clock-rate is increased and the systems races to idle within a few milliseconds.

When a process stalls I would already know whether it's IO or computation. Depending on the chirping I may reach for either ping or top to investigate further. Sometimes I leave these chirps on for hours. It's nonintrusive feedback to me about background tasks and when they clear.

I actually worry that my next machine will not have this flaw. And now I'm thinking of a syscall-chirp generator to get an even better feel for the pulse of the machine :-)

Or the sound of a modem to let you know the internet is working? Nothing sounds better than two pulsing, clicking sine waves finding each other after long last, making love, and giving birth to white noise.

No thanks, I'll take all my computers and electronics as quiet as possible.

Heh, I really, really liked that sound as well.

But I can't explain why really. Could be the sci-fi nerd in me similar to the way we tend to like the feel of mechanical toggle switches.

Oh it’s still around. I just bought a 14TB external for my desk and god it’s loud.

It’s a bad loud too. Old 160MB Quantum SCSI drives have that satisfying crispy whine and that sound like some tiny hamster is changing gears around inside of it when it does a seek.

I’m surprised someone hasn’t made a SATA MITM that does this.

I once put an LED in series on a long rs232 link so I could see them flash when I/O was happening. But they have the spare voltage to work with.

Sometimes the motherboard makes a similar, but much softer, hum.

Yup, I could tell by ear if my computer had crashed and I should hard restart or if there was still hope for the program if I waited it out.