What is your favorite sound?

[saras]

19. All sounds are boring, eventually. The process of getting there is fascinating.

Favorites is a weird concept... one of my favorites is the noise that I've never heard anything like THAT before...
Marc Bolan's voice
Javanese court gamelan
Multiple cats purring around one's head
The sound of people working on household tasks without conversation, media, or machines
The wind blowing through long wires that hum
Explosions in complex reverberant spaces
Calves playing (moo doesn't BEGIN to do it justice)
Really low notes on pipe organs
Water in a fast creek with boulders
Complex rhythmic machines (an Artos wire stripper from the 20s was the best drum machine I've EVER heard, bar none)

I'm a noise junkie. There are very few sounds I don't like (the thing about nails on blackboards is that the ultrasonics are at ear-splitting volume - tame the sound in a recording studio and it's pretty cool, like rubbing balloons), with the possible exception of drum loops, synth sounds programmed by people without subtlety of discernment, and devices like motorcycles and leaf blowers that are designed to be noisy for adolescent male reasons. (obviously all motorcycles are not like this, and some loud ones, like dragsters, have to be, but if you know motorcycles, you know the difference between an expansion chamber tuned for torque, high-speed horsepower, or sheer volume.)

And talk radio. Hatred is an understatement. I would kick over a whole row of Hell's Angels' Harleys to make talk radio shut up. It doesn't matter who, or what they say - it's the same voice they use in a lot of ads. That voice where, if a real person talked like that to your face, you'd knee them in the gonads without a second thought.