"Unlike standard ice, it doesn’t clink; instead, it makes a soothing, gently percussive shuffling sound, like someone shaking an afuche-cabasa in the apartment next door."

From "Pellet Ice Is the Good Ice" (The New Yorker).

Pellet ice is cylindrical, with smooth sides and rough ends, as if each piece had been snapped off of a long dowel of ice. Unlike most ice, which is either carved from a larger block or frozen in a mold, it is made from paper-thin flakes of ice that are pressed into a solid mass—a method familiar to anyone who’s packed soft fresh snow into a dense, compact snowball—and then pushed through round holes punched in a metal sheet, creating a fragile cylinder that breaks off into pieces. Here’s where pellet ice differs from crushed ice, with which it is often erroneously conflated: the compression of the nuggets creates flaky layers, which, as in a well-laminated pastry, render the ice pellets lightweight and airy, with crevices and tiny caves into which your drink can penetrate, and a yielding texture perfect for chewing. The ice is small, each piece only about a centimetre long and narrower in diameter, so it fills a glass more efficiently than lumbering cubes or half-moons, and somehow, in a quirk of thermodynamics, it allegedly melts more slowly.

It's the part about the sound that interests me the most. I have a quirky dislike for the sound of ice cubes clinking in a glass. I'm familiar with the alternative of omitting ice altogether, but this soothing, gently percussive shuffling sound is revelatory. Given my very low sense of taste and smell, I care more than most people about the texture and temperature of things I eat and drink, but rarely use ice, so I sacrifice a dimension of coldness because of a mild aversion to ice. But if ice brought cold and not merely silence but a soothing, gently percussive shuffling sound....