Condensate Recovery and Steam Traps 

I used to work in a hospital. All along the main steam line there would be a chitter chatter tapping noise, it sounded like morse code but not beeps. A guy I worked with said it was the traps on the drip legs. It seems like the only plausible explanation, the valve opening and shutting. However, if there are hundreds of taps/chatters a minute, the valve flickering open and shut like that, does that not suggest something’s wrong with the valve? Or is it normal for a trap to chatter like this? Any help would be greatly appreciated, I tried google but can only find pages discussing using electronic listening devices to hear through the static whether or not a traps functioning correctly