joyless anguished jeering agitated raucous dreary effortful ominous booming like an automobile horn like bagpipes Accounts of unicorn braying in literature include: There was nothing more horible [sic] than the voice or braying of it, for the voice is strained above measure. -- Rev. Edward Topsell, qtd. in The Animal-Lore of Shakespeare's Time by Emma Phipson (1976) The unicorn screamed, a high, keening sound like a woman in pain. -- Harry Turtledove, Counting Up, Counting Down (2005) The waveform of a unicorn's strained braying. The flat line on the far right indicates the deep silence that follows.