White noise as a system monitoring aid? Real or myth?

Ok, I don't know if this is/was a sys admin urban myth, but when I was a student I heard of technique to help sys admins monitor a server without actively and constantly checking on it.

What they would do is route something like CPU usage or network saturation to a white noise generator. They would play this in the background at low volume, and if some unusual activity occurred the noise would sound different (volume, tone?) They would then check on the server using the regular console tools.

My question is, has anyone tried this? Does such a program or technique exist?

Real

This was certainly possible, and used, on at least some makes of older mainframes (1970s, early 1980s). The console (a Teletype, if you have ever seen such a thing) had a small speaker and a volume control. When this was turned up the audio output was indicative of the work the CPU was doing. Much of the work was off-line batch work and with practice it was possible to recognise certain distinctive 'signatures' of some jobs in normal mode and the shrill whine of a job in a loop. As the console would become sluggish when the machine was very busy the main use of the speaker was to allow the operator to check whether a job was progressing (the sound would usually vary) or stuck. On the lighter side, it also allowed jobs to be written to create certain signatures, for example a, somewhat atonal but recognisable, "Jingle Bells".

During the LISA 2000 (Large Installations System Administration) conference, Michael Gilfix and Alva Couch presented a paper: Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound (PDF). While this research used jungle sounds instead of white noise, the idea is the same.

Solaris has an option to snoop ( the equivalent of tcpdump ) which produced some audio when a packet was sent or received. This was used so you could hear the network.....