I often hear sounds that some would immediately describe as annoying, but I either hear it as genuinely beautiful, or I make a cognitive choice to listen to an interesting sound differently – hearing layers, highest pitches, lowest pitches, phrases, arrhythmic features…it's a great feeling of "letting go" that often fights with my daily duties of maintaining order and defining function.

When people understand the noise, say a rooster, but cannot turn the sound off, it the sound "has a face" and can be perceived as almost heckling the listener. "If I could only throw a stone and stop the rooster from cawing…"

When a sound is unidentified, the sound could, in some cases, come off as disturbing in a threatening way. The sound has no face, and it's origin might not be discernible, therefore throwing the listeners senses into a shadow of self doubt. In some cases this could be scary, it could be angering, it all depends on the situation, but I think the control issue goes even further, because the listener not only wants to possibly control/eliminate the sound, but first master the details of its origin.

Thanks for yr posts. I definitely agree that control is part of the answer. But there's also an element of shared purpose – if you're in a band with someone making horrible noise on an electric guitar, or if you're part of the crowd that paid to see it, you might feel differently from the neighbor next door. We can extend this thought to culture as well. If you grow up in a city that has lots of loud parades in the summer, you might find those events exciting as an adult. But if you grow up in a quiet suburb, and you were happy in that environment, you might find the volume and activity unsettling.

But to complicate things even further, what about the connection between *understanding* and sounds we can't control at all? What I mean is, when we can't control a sound, sometimes we take comfort in being able to domesticate it with knowledge. For example, I used to be really bothered by the click-click-BANG-CRACK of my radiator, until I learned the physics of it (maybe someone can post about this someday). There is something about being able to explain a phenomenon that makes it a bit more tolerable to the ears and eyes. I think that the connection between knowledge and sensory reception is an enticing one to consider.