There’s a whole lot of work being done on monitoring the health and status of systems using differing patterns of background sound. Perhaps your server farm sounds like a rain forest, and a cricket chirps every time someone portscans you.
It turns out I have one of these set up for free. I run continuous builds for our books in production on my office G5, and the G5 fans are very responsive to processor load. So whenever the build system decides to rebuild a book (because an author has checked in changes), the fans kick in, and I can wander over and see what’s cooking. It’s surprisingly useful feedback.
