So rather than play a good game, you want to listen a water drop drop in a cave. The BG2Fixpack and BGT-weidu fix some minor ambient sounds... but still your best bet is to disable them when they take too much power from the system, aka to do this, quoting myself:

2. Put the ambient sounds off from the BGConfig.exe, as some of the areas might have no ambient sounds and so the game tries to start them many time continuously, and so looses processing power. So the baldur.ini should have these:
Low Mem Sounds 1=0
Low Mem Sounds 2=1

And the other 24 points I pointed in that post.
The Enhanced Edition games don't suffer the ambient sound bug... well the latest versions don't, as far as I can tell. Or from lag.

 
What an odd response. As if audio is not part of a game experience? Yes, I would like to hear the drips in the cave as I play, which I am currently doing regardless of sounds. Your condescension is not particularly helpful, nor do I understand why you felt the need to preface your response with it rather than cut straight to answering the question asked. I believe my post made it clear that I am not only aware why the issue occurs, but that I already know to turn off ambient sounds in areas that don't have them. And that I was hoping for a better solution than 'repeatedly turn ambient sound on and off in config.' Or buying additional copies of the games I already own twice over. I also have BGT and Fixpack installed, and several other mods besides, none of which affect the problem, of course.
 

With all the advanced scripting that people do on this game, would it be possible for someone to alter the routine for ambient sounds such that this doesn't happen?

No. It's not about scripting. It's a faulty map file(specifically a .are's references that do not match the existing .wav files).

Are faulty references not fixable? Can the map file be altered to change those references? Or if not, is there a way to find out which references are broken, so dummy wav files with no audio could be created so that the references would have referents?

So it's generally known that there's a bug in how BG handles ambient sound that on many systems it becomes unplayable if there are no sounds, due to the game tying up the processor trying to trigger sounds that don't exist. With all the advanced scripting that people do on this game, would it be possible for someone to alter the routine for ambient sounds such that this doesn't happen? I would love a small mod that fixed this so I didn't have to choose between missing out on all those nostalgic sounds, but also don't have to keep turning ambient sounds on and off in config depending on area.

(Feel free to relocate this topic if necessary. I wasn't sure where else to put it.)

Known issue with TobEx.
 
Further reading and solutions:
 
* Chanters in Candlekeep (SHS thread)
 
* Infinity Sounds

Thanks, disabling the sound fix option in tobex fixed it for me. They still won't play their sounds like they should on left-click for some reason, but ambient sound clips are playing now, and the right-click will still play it as well.

Hi all. I've just installed BGT for the first time, and it generally seems to work, but right at the start I've already encountered a bug with NPC sounds. In Candlekeep, several NPCs I've encountered so far that are supposed to play audio (but no text dialogue) are not playing their sounds. I haven't gone any further into the game so I don't know how widespread the issue is, but at the least the Noblewoman in the Inn and the chanters on the southwest side of the main keep don't play their audio. When I click on them, I just get the "doesn't have anything to say" text. The chanters are not playing their audio ambiently when I approach them either. All of these sounds play normally if I run BG1 on its own.

In terms of mods, I have the most recent versions of (in install order) ToBex, BG2 Fixpack, Ascension (weidu), and BGT. Does have any idea why some sounds aren't playing, and how I can repair this?