The sound of a broken human beatbox, far far away.

My flatmate Kogo is away on a business trip to Osaka for the whole of this month. His cousin from Kobe is staying in his room while he's away, just taking a kind of holiday in Tokyo. Lovely guy, but really fucking odd when he's out of sight. Through the very thin wall connecting our rooms I can hear that periodically he lapses into a state of going "um" every ten seconds or so. It's not an "uhm" like when you're hesitating: it's a brief, deep-sounding, falling "um." Kind of like one of the sounds you can set your Apple Mac to make when you make an invalid command. And no, there's no Apple Mac in his room. It's a pretty quiet sound but it's constant. I remember a guy at school when I was fifteen and if you sat in a quiet room with him, he used to make small whimpering sounds every few minutes. Open-minded and tolerant as I'm trying to be about my temporary flatmate's psychological need to make an "um" every ten seconds or so, it's starting to annoy me. This evening it's been particularly bad: right now he's changed gear for the first time and is producing a series of rising "oooom" sounds.