There's that really distinctive "Asian cicada" sound. Sustained, repetitive "wiu wiu wiu" and then suddenly a shift to slightly lower, flatter tone that is held for four or five beats "waaaaaa." My musicologist friends could describe it better, I'm sure, if they heard it.
I don't recall hearing that particular, very distinctive cicada sound anywhere in the US (that doesn't mean I've never heard it… just that it never seemed salient). But I remember it from summer in Korea in 91, and from my summers here more recently. The one other place I've heard it and really noticed it, is in Japanese anime — it seems to function like an audio signifier for "hot, humid, summer stillness," kind of the way traditional crickets chirping signifies "silence" in American cartoons.
I really like the sound.
Like you, some of my favorite sounds in nature are made by cicadas. I remember them fondly from the hot central Illinois summers of my youth. The sound of cicadas was one of the few things I missed about Illionis after moving to Minnesota.
Your description of the Asian cicada sound seems musicologically quite sophistocated to me!
While living in southern Indiana, where I heard some of the loudest cicadas on the planet (this is no exaggeration!), I learned that all cicadas are periodic, that is, they only emerge every certain number of years. And all cicadas, if memory servers, emerge on yearly cycles that are counted in prime numbers–there are 3-year, 5-year, etc. cicadas, all the way up to 17-year cicadas. Their life cycles are one of the few instances of prime numbers in nature–pretty cool, huh?
During one of my last summers in Bloomington, Indiana, in May/June of 2004, the fabled 17-year cicadas emerged. Their only defense against predators is their sheer numbers–their density was unbelievable. They were so loud in my back yard that my ears would ring after being outside for 10 minutes. It was a truly awesome natural event. I wasn’t as adventurous as the Bloomington man who fried up and ate about 30 of them, only to find out that his allergy to shellfish made him allergic to cicadas as well–he nearly died. I just enjoyed listening to them.