[citatus]

There is an old French verb that expresses this drumming of obsession. That denotes this group of asemic sounds that disturb rational thought inside the skull and that awaken in the process a nonlinguistic memory. Tarabust, rather than hum, is perhaps the word that should be suggested. Tarabustis is attested after Chrétien de Troyes, in the fourteenth century. “Something tarabusts me.”

Tarabust is an unstable word. Two distinct worlds meet in it, attract it, and thus divide it according to two processes of morphological derivation that are both too plausible for the philologist to decide between them. The word tarabust is itself disputed between the group of that which belabors and the group of that which drums. Between the rabasta group (the noise of quarreling, the belaboring group) and the tabustar group (hitting, talabussare, tamburare, the family of resonators, of drums). Either vociferous human coitus. Or percussions of hollow objects. Acoustic obsession is unable to distinguish in what it hears between what it ceaselessly wants to hear and what it cannot have heard. An incomprehensible noise that belabors. A noise that could either be quarreling or drumming, panting or blows. It was very rhythmic. We come from this noise. It is our seed.
Every woman, every man, every child immediately recognizes the tarabust. Salmon swim upstream and back in time in order to die at the exact spawning ground where they were conceived. And spawn, and die.

Trans. note: Tarabust is a noun that has fallen out of use in contemporary French, although its verbal form tarabuster, “to pester or bother,” is still to be heard.

Pascal Quignard, "The Hatred of Music" (1996)